Week 2

My second week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative was a unique experience.

It started off normal enough. On Tuesday, I, with the help of my research supervisors Sarah and Caitlin, ran some more tests on the Wes machine.We did the normal procedure of preparing the samples and filling out a plate, and we were able to finish a decent amount of work for the day.

On Wednesday, the craziness began. One of my supervisors, Caitlin, was not able to make it, and my other supervisor, Sarah, is one of the busiest people in the department as she is always running around helping out everybody and she is also involved in a various number of projects, and that day she had planned to spend the entire time that I was there in a section of the lab that I do not have clearance to enter, believing that Caitlin would show up to help me out. Since my supervisors were not there to tell me what to do, I thought that it was going to be an easy, relaxed day. Boy, was I wrong. One of the other lab workers decided to put me to the task of cleaning and organizing the freezers. This doesn't sound that bad, but when you have to remove boxes full of slides from freezers set to -80 C and rearrange them in a room at 4 C for four hours, it gets kinda bad. The worst part about it was that the gloves I wore for the entire process were the same type of latex gloves that are used for class dissections, so I could not feel my fingers for the rest of the day. The second worst part was that I didn't even finish organizing half of a freezer, so I will probably have to do this again in the near future.

The highlight of the week had to be on Thursday, during the weekly lab meetings where everyone discusses the issues in the lab and any new findings that have been made. There is also a presentation by one of the researchers every week, and this week Matt, the one who had to present, had not gathered enough data for a proper presentation, so he shared an article that he thought was relevant to the majority of the researchers in the lab. It turns out that he had only read the abstract before sending it to all of the other researchers, and it also turned out that the article he had selected was utter crap. So the next two hours were spent ripping apart the article in a thorough fashion, and they turned the presentation into a session to teach me and the other interns about how not to write a scientific paper.

Friday went back to normal to some degree, but due to the lack of organization in a freezer that I did not have a chance to organize, we were not able to find the proper samples, and we spent most of the day finishing leftover busy work. And that's how this week went.