First semester PhD student, doing lab rotations, and completely blew a presentation in the lab I wanted to be placed in.

Hi all,

I am in my first semester of a life sciences based Ph.D. program and we all do 3 total rotations. Last Friday, I presented the results of my second rotation at their weekly lab meeting. Unfortunately, I completely blew it. The presentation was BAD. It was horrendous. The worst part was that I apparently had misunderstood the experiment and hadn't done the final component. I had gotten instructions from the PI about how to proceed with the rest of the experiment about a week before my rotation ended and I unfortunately had misunderstood him. I was under the impression that I was supposed to omit a certain part of the experiment, but it turns out that what I omitted was very crucial to the results of that experiment.

I am devastated and so ashamed. I have pretty much scrapped all hopes of ending up in his lab and am focusing my efforts and plans elsewhere now. Luckily, my backup lab is headed by someone who I know is a phenomenal and supportive mentor, but unfortunately I was more interested in the research being done at the other lab.

I might be catastrophizing but over the last few days, I completely convinced myself that it's completely over and that all hope is lost.

Honestly feeling an insane level of imposter syndrome.