My first week on the job was fun, exciting, nervous and a little bit stressed.
The graduate student I am working with called Tess, she is really awesome. She let me do DNA extraction for her project on my first day!!! Learning all different kind of lab techniques and playing with all those high-tech equipments are really cool.
A major part of my week are reading papers because I need to know what kind of methods people came up with already, maybe I can borrow their methods to test my hypothesis. However, scientific papers are not fun to read. I got very stressed for a while when I don’t understand them. But things are getting a little better, I realized that when you are reading the paper, you don’t need to understand everything, just need to get the part you need!!
I just got an email from Tess saying that our experiment we did yesterday works. We cultured some E. coli a few days ago for cells separation experiment, after we’re done with the experiment, we put them into the incubator to see they are still alive or not. Tess sent me a picture said that “you had some new friends in the incubator this morning!” Too bad I can’t upload the picture to show you guys!!
I hope everybody is having a good week.
Caihong
What an exciting first day in the lab, Caihong, I look forward to seeing your work and meeting your new “friends”!
Jennifer
You made great strides this week. Congrats on getting the cells to grow. Remember when I said that at one point the animals I was working with to measure feeding rates died, and I had to start all over. Things like that happen in science. Hopefully that won’t happen to you this summer!