First Day Impressions

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was for me to find my way around the building. Finding the office and lab were simple enough, and it felt much less overwhelming having the researchers show me around then going through on my own. But I definitely will not be touring around the UCSD campus with ease anytime soon.

My colleagues were a mix of undergraduates and graduates, their names were Shannon, Kristen, Melvin, Art, Matt, Ruby, Navi, and Nuha. My mentor assigned me to shadow and assist Shannon and Matt throughout my internship. Everyone seemed to be very excited to work with us and they were very nice and reassuring that we would do fine. I look forward to working with everyone. I find it interesting how open my role is, since I would be following and assisting two researchers I would participate or at least observe each aspect of their work. I would be slicing mouse brains and mounting brains on slides, genotype rat tail DNA, dissolve pieces of mouse organs to release the DNA. I'm excited to start genotyping and using the PCR machine, a piece of technology in molecular biology used to amplify a single copy or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence, on my own.

​What are you worried about?​

I am still a bit worried about accidentally breaking something but I have found that it is easy to navigate around the lab without bumping into things. I am also a bit more at ease knowing that I'll be constantly supervised and I won't make simple mistakes. I think now my only concern is survivng hour-long traffic.