I am definitely feeling the pressures of scope creep as I near closer to my Master’s defense. I made the mistake of waiting until the last month to run my most important and intricate experiment, not giving myself enough time to repeat it if something were to go wrong. Also, best case became finishing the experiment, collecting and analyzing data 2 days before the day of the defense. This would really cause the quality of my project to suffer. What I was trying to do to remedy this situation was spend the last few weekends in the lab, work through them and try to finish the experiment faster. With 2 weeks left I am realizing that the scope of this experiment was too large. What I am doing now is breaking the experiment into parts, completing the barest minimum (extreme cases) for each part and with their results make educated guesses or extrapolate the other scenarios I wanted to study. For my blood-brain barrier model I will break it up into neuronal, astrocyte, and endothelial cultures. Instead of studying all TAT neurotoxicity concentration I will just look at 3 extremes, 2ng, 5ng, and 10ng, on the cell cultures. Then I can judge the integrity of the blood-brain barrier model under HIV protein toxicity just from the results of these culture studies. That is, if at 10ng all three cell types die, I can say the blood-brain barrier will not hold up, it will become permeable. My advisor and committee have said this can be enough so I should be fine. However, if I had managed my time better I could have had more convincing and satisfying results.