Seminar Shpeel!
What I've been up to the past few weeks...
The past few weeks have probably been some of the busiest and most nerve-wracking weeks of my life. I've been super busy with a lot of imaging - some nights I was in lab past midnight! On top of all of the experiments, last Monday I presented for journal club (on a Cell Stem Cell paper called "TEL-AML1 Corrupts HSCs to Persist in the Bone Marrow and Initiate Leukemia") and a few days later on Thursday I presented all of the research that I'd done in the past two months at the lab meeting. Lastly, I finally finished my poster! Here's little picture of it:
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Oh, did I mention? We got a Wolfgang Puck pressure cooker for our imaging experiments! Look, it's beautiful:
I'm sad to say that I haven't been using it recently. I've found that, for various reasons, the pressure cooker doesn't work for me. Only after we got the pressure cooker did I discover that a simple microwave works the best. Oh, science, how I love thee...
Career Panel
The career panel last Wednesday was probably one of the most helpful and inspirational talks I've ever been to. Hearing about people's lives, about what steps they've taken to come to the stage that they're at right now.
I was really intrigued about the analogy that Elizabeth made about researchers and doctors, where the doctors are the waiters/waitresses and the researchers the chefs. Thinking about this idea made my desire to pursue the M.D./Ph.D. program even stronger. Similar to how there's a lot of miscommunication and misunderstandings between chefs and waiters, I think there's a huge divide between doctors and researchers. This is just my perception - I don't know if it's right - I feel like researchers spend their entire lives doing experiments and, occasionally, making great discoveries, but their efforts are wasted because the doctors might not keep up with the latest news. Doctors spend their entire lives listening to patients, observing them, and helping ease their ailments but what they know about their patients and their diseases rarely falls into the ears of the researchers. Maybe my perception of M.D./Ph.D.'s are idealistic, but what I want to do with both those degrees is to lessen that gap, to create more communication between the M.D.'s and the Ph.D's.
Another thing that amazed me was something that Elliot said. While he was describing his undergraduate research at Purdue, Elliot mentioned how every time something new came into the lab, his P.I. would tell him how it worked and how to use it. This description painted a really vivid picture in my mind. It fascinated me because there are so many things in my lab that I see every day but I don't know how it works or how to use it. Another thing that amazed me was how Elliot was able to publish a paper as a first author, how he was able to juggle schoolwork and lab work so well. That's my dream.
Anyway, I'm going to go back to my staining! Funfunfun :)
