everydaaaaayyyyy

Today (hold up, you have to say it in your head like "todaaaaaye" because that is how I have apparently gotten in the habit of pronouncing it. lol.) was a pretty good day in the lab. I was really tired, so the first hour or so of reading this research paper about two kinds of stem cells' locations in bone marrow was pretty unproductive. But Hui let me help her isolate plasmids from an E. coli sample. It was pretty cool but I messed up a little bit and felt really bad. I think she understood, but still. I'm trying to prove that I can handle my own project and I go around spilling E. coli twice while pouring. -___- It took like two hours because we had to do a bunch of steps of centrifuging and adding different solutions. One of the solutions we added to the sample lysed the cell membranes so there was this freaky white gunk in the liquid. When we centrifuged it it didn't pellet out on the bottom like usual. It was stuck all over one side. Gross. But normal, apparently. Hui is really nice.

After that I ate lunch and made some awkward small talk in the grad/undergrad student office-y room. Then Michele and I changed the media on the cell cultures. The other undergrads were watching me do it when Colin walked by and thought we were having some great party or something with so many people standing around. It was cute.

Then I read some more (Michele gave me like 6 20+ page articles to read for my project) and did some more awkward small talk. Hui was passaging cells later, which is when you move a colony to a new flask and freeze some, so I watched that. It was pretty cool. All of these activities involved lab coats, which is AWESOME. I need my own to just wear all of the time even though it makes me feel kind of like a tool. haha.

After work Rubecca and Amy met me at the Union and we got Babcock Hall ice cream. Delicious. Then we came home and I made pasta for dinner and managed to burn some of the linguine to the bottom of the pan. ugh. But the not burn part tasted awesome!

Yesterday was pretty good too. I got my own lab notebook. It is hard cover and green and says "laboratory notebook" or something in impressive gold letters across the front. There is a page of intense, ridiculous instructions that detail how to keep records if you plan to try to claim a patent on the stuff you record in it. Lots of stuff about making carbon copies of each page and signatures and such. Maybe I will scan it.

I feel so busy though. I only have like four hours of being awake when I get home from work. :( Being an adult is therefore kind of lame.

Sincerely,

Sara

it's like I'm an adult!

Today was my first day in the lab. 9-5:30 today. Dude, I am an adult. What! It was one part dull, one part exciting and many parts awesome. The lab uses mice to study a lot of cool biology things that I don't feel like explaining that relate to diabetes. Essentially, there is a mutation that causes the mice to not become obese on a high fat diet and the lab is looking into why some adipose tissue grows a lot (causing obesity) and some doesn't when the tissue is structurally identical.

I started the day by getting lost and ending up on the wrong side of the building. There is a dude on that side with almost the same name as the professor I am working for, so those people were pretty confused. But I made it over successfully with the help of a nice lady. The professor I'm working for is really sweet. He spoke to me for about 90 minutes about what the lab does and then gave me a book to read. I read most of the day and met some other people who work in the lab. They were all pretty nice and predictably asked me how NYC is. I did some more internet research, which mostly consisted of me looking up terminology on wikipedia.

At the end of the day I went up to the mice room. That was pretty much the highlight of the day. I got to wear a lab coat. Fancy stuff.

First we stopped off at the autoclave room, where everything looked to be 50 or 60 years old. The autoclave machine has been used so many times that you can't turn the knob to the mark for the function you want. You have to turn it past it. They mostly judge where to turn to based off of the sound the machine makes. ... yeah.

The mouse room is really dirty from mites and diseases, so the security level is F, which is really bad. We had to put on booties, disposable lab coats, gloves and sleeves. The undergrads I was observing had to feed and weigh the mice. They told me about the projects going on and I looked at a bunch of adorable mice. Sadly, one of the pregnant mothers in the vitamin A deficiency experiment had a miscarriage and we had to euthanize her. It was morbidly cool because we saw the fetus in her bedding. There was only one so the woman I was observing hypothesized that she had eaten the other ones.

I am looking forward to tomorrow because it will supposedly involve cell cultures.

Best,

Sara