Nikhil Aggarwal, Week 1, June 11-15 at Upenn

As I entered my lab at 9:30 on Monday morning, I was surprised to see only one other person in the lab, an undergraduate student. After introducing myself, getting my Penn ID, and taking a tour of the lab, the undergraduate student gave me literature to read and basic mat lab tasks.

Overall, my first week at the lab consisted mainly of reading literature. In fact, the first assignment that my Post Doc had given me was to read 10-15 literature articles on past studies that studied creativity, found different areas of the brain associated with creativity, or were able to increase creativity. Then, I had to present a PowerPoint on Friday based on my findings. Initially, I was upset since I felt like I would be reading literature for the entirety of my time at the lab. However, in expressing my desire to do more “hands-on” research, he explained that after thoroughly researching past studies, I would be conducting my own similar experiment in relation to my post doc’s current research. Furthermore, every 1-2 days, my post doc and I sit down together and review literature from a previous study. At the end, he asks me questions regarding my understanding of the material. Additionally, I will be working with another student in measuring Cortisol concentration levels in children.

From a social standpoint, my lab is very quiet and since most people are relatively new to the lab, nobody really knows each other. In fact, this week, it seems like I see new people walk into the lab every day. Additionally, every Wednesday we have a lab meeting where someone presents his or her research and we all eat lunch together. Surprisingly, I have not met my PI yet.

Comments

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...

Alan - First Week at UCSF

Hi Everyone! After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF. First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is). I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students...

Wendy Li, Week 1

It is now early July and I have finally started my lab work. I arrived there at about 9 am on the very first day of my lab and found out that there were only two people in the office—Alex, a graduate student in engineering school, and me. “There should be more people in the office, but most of them went to a vacuum workshop today.” Alex told me. My work officially started at 10:30 am when my post doctor Subarna came to the lab. Familiarizing me with all the facilities in lab, Subarna first gave me a lab tour. Meanwhile, he showed me all the basic operations with vacuum chamber, ellipsometer, as well as the spin coater. During the rest of this past week, I was in the process of making my own films. I learned to cut Si wafer into 1*1 cm pieces and clean the surface of these Si wafer with duster and plasma which can effectively clean up all the extra organic particles from the wafer. Further, I prepared 10 percent polystyrene (PS 8000) toluene solution as the material for spin coating. ...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

Search This Blog