reminder, I've been working on olfaction in mice at Duke University.
My last week at Duke was a quite surreal. Neha's flight back to Durham from
California was delayed until Monday night, so on Monday I worked on my
presentation. Ting presented her paper for journal club on Oxygen Sensitivity of
mitochondrial function in rat arterial chemoreceptors. It was pretty interesting.
Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, Neha helped me with picking the appropriate
images to show for the presentation and analysis and graphing of my data.
On Wednesday morning, the whole lab went blueberry picking! It was awesome.
People who didn't have cars got lifts from people who did at the lab at 9, and then
we all met at the blueberry farm at 9:30. Yue drove me and Sahana (another high
school student), and we got lost for at least half an hour because there was no
sign for the blueberry farm! Anyway, we got there and picked blueberries. It was
really cheap too. We stayed at the farm for a bit, and then eight of us went to the
diner for lunch. This was when I really saw how much support the lab members
had for each other and how much they appreciated some "down" time.
On Thursday, it was my "big day". I presented my data and findings to the whole
lab with Neha by my side. Hiro pointed out some mistakes I had made in defining
and the results that I presented. Neha and I talked through them and she's going
to count the positive cells again. The process is really subjective because some
may count one cell has positive but others may see it as just the background, so
she's going to figure that out for me. I brought some dunkin donuts for everyone,
and Jessica (the lab technician) brought some brownies, cookies, green tea and
chips. Hiro, Natalie, Ming-Shan had some questions and I answered them with
some hesitation but with the help from Neha, it was all good. It was sort of
intimidating at first because I was presenting to very intellectual people but they
were all very supportive. Hiro said that he wasn't going to be in the lab on Friday
so he was going to say goodbye. I told him it was truly a great experience
working in his lab and we're going to keep in touch!
On Friday, Neha and I talked about the results and the countings. Then she took
me out for lunch at Sushi Love. Ming-Shan heard about it and asked if she could
come. Just five minutes later, the whole lab was walking to the restaurant. It was
really cool. Then at five thirty, I said goodbye to everyone. It was really an
amazing experience working at Duke. To be honest, I miss it!
Here are some photos from the past five weeks:
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| This is one of our gels for genotyping. |
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| This was my Duke ID card. It gave me access to the lab. |
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| This was my lab bench area. |
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| This was the microscope we used for looking at the slides in different filters. |
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| I used this cryotome to section paraffin blocks of tissue. |
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