Peddie EXP Summer 2018

This week's mostly been about statistical analysis, which was great at first until we realized that we didn't have enough rat subjects for our data to be statistically significant, which means...more scoring!!(yay) I'm not complaining, but I really would have loved to see some solid results. No one else was as disappointed, so I guess this pace at the lab is the norm. This means, however, that I probably won't be able to be there when the statistics actually end up being significant enough to establish a conclusion. Other than that, I found a really great Thai restaurant just around the corner of where I've been living, but I'm leaving on Wednesday, so I think I'm just gonna pig out every day until I actually have to leave :(

My fingerprints haven’t been processed yet, and with my luck, I think they’ll be done by the time I leave the lab. At this point, I don’t really mind though. Yesterday, I learned about sectioning rat brains and how to identify layers of the rat brain based on a rat brain atlas. The hippocampus and dentate gyrus has basically been plastered into my brain by now  (-- and my nose, they smell terrible), and I am really happy to say that I will have no interactions with live rats. I tried to take a quick picture of a section of the brain, but someone caught me (oops). Otherwise, I’ve been paired with an undergrad from Temple U, who I’ve gotten along really well with, and I met another senior in high school from Texas who’s also working in the lab. We got into this really long conversation about colleges over lunch, and that is the last time I want to think about it for the summer :). I think I’ve got around two weeks left, which seems like too short of a time for me to finish the projec...

My second week’s been a bit tedious. I finished scoring behavioral videos way before my postdoc, Giulia, thought I’d be done, which she said was impressive, but also left her with almost no work for me to do. On the bright side, I’ve gotten really good at reading literature and grasping main ideas, so I don’t feel like a complete dunce anymore at meetings and journal clubs. Giulia says that once my fingerprints get processed through their system, I’ll be authorized to work on the benches, where I can actually get my hands dirty, so hopefully that happens soon. On another note, I’ve been getting more time to explore center city, and had a really great cheese steak last night, but it kind of went downhill from there, and now I’m really regretting not getting the taco salad instead.