Week One

My first week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative at the Translational Neurotrauma Lab can be wholesomely described as an entirely new and alien experience.

Before joining the research efforts at the ABC, I had a very preconceived notion about the nature of research. I thought that the professor controls everything within the lab and dictates every responsibility to high school interns out of a sense of untrustworthiness. Also, I thought that to pursue research was to throw yourself into the fire immediately with some training and you proceeded under the watchful eye of the professors and lab interns.

All of these notions were proven a mix of truths and untruths.

But anyway, updates on the past week.

On Monday, I learned all about the materials needed to properly run the Wes machine and where they were all stored, which is important information to consider for experiments.

On Wednesday, I ran a sham plate for the samples from the VPM region of the brain for Sprague Dawley rats to ascertain which samples would be appropriate to run with the injured samples.

On Thursday, I participated in a lab meeting with all the personnel in the lab. There, we discussed specific projects that other lab personnel were pursuing as well as addressing problems and solutions to many issues in the lab. Afterwards, we watched a presentation on a study on the reduction of aggression in mice after the addition of a cage divider, where it was ascertained that a cage divider heavily affected aggression levels in mice. Then, lab personnel offered other avenues to pursue as well as improvements to make on the experiment. After the lab meeting, my advisor then again extensively reviewed the steps needed to run the Wes machine again and I wrote the steps in my lab notebook.

I hope that on Friday, I can finally run Wes plates on our own and be well on my way to maximizing our data.

So that’s the update for the week.

Till next week, see you all later.