In the beginning...
I'm Vera, a rising senior at Jordan High School in Durham. I've just started working in the mycology lab at Duke, helping out with a graduate student's project looking at speciation and hybrids between oyster mushroom species. Frankly, I'm a wee bit lost (even after the head of my lab spent a good while talking it over with me). Mycology is something I know nothing about and I haven't had the opportunities of great lab situations in school that might help me out. I'm starting to get a better feel for our project as I read more about it, but it's kind of hard to connect the individual cultures I've been making to the bigger picture. On the other hand, I've only been there a day, and I love the lab environment. Morgan, a Duke student, really helped show me around yesterday and helped me through the procedures.
I'm really enjoying the decoration and general feeling of my lab, so I'm going to give you all a little description. It's a couple pretty small rooms with pictures of unique mushrooms all over the walls. There are a couple scattered computers and spore cultures in just about every cabinet you open. Yesterday they were preparing for a collecting trip to Tennessee, so the main table had baskets, rakes, and tools strewn across it. People wander in and out periodically. It's the kind of place where the lab's door has been altered with Sharpie to make it the "Counter-Cultural Mycology" lab.
I guess I'll finish with a little bit about me. I want to study environmental science, though with a little bit more of a political or activist outlook. I'm particularly interested in marine bio stuff and pretty much anything where I get to be outside. This is my first time ever working in a lab and I'm kind of phenomenally excited about this, especially after my first day. I also study Spanish and really want to work in Latin America when I grow up.
