Lunch With My Mentor

Today I had lunch with my mentor, Dr. Alexander Sasha Kauffman, and my peer, Andres O' Sullivan. All together we had a casual discussion of certain topics such as internship projects, what we hope to learn overall from this internship, what our mentor could do to help us achieve this, and how we have felt so far about our internship experience. We even got to learn about our mentor's life and job, while talking to him about our future plans. Dr. Kauffman lived in Seattle, Washington, before he moved to California to work in the research facilities in UCSD. He is a neuroendocrinologist but his main job is overviewing his colleagues' work while also conducting his own experiments for researching the use and purpose of Kisspeptin in mice brains. I felt hesitant at having lunch with my mentor, given that he is my boss in every meaning of the word and could fire me at the snap of his fingers. I questioned everything I did, how often should I smile? how much longer should I keep on talking? etc. Luckily, Dr. Kauffman broke the ice by asking us what we've done so far in the lab and what we want out of this experience. Andres and I told him how we had begun to genotype for the cre-flox gene in mice with Ruby, we were also given the opportunity to micropunch brains with Shannon, and saw the process of brain slicing and a quick glance at brain anatomy with our lab manager, Art. I said how the thing I most desired from this experience was testing the waters on how I've felt with research science and neuroendocrinology and I if I would be willing to pursue a career in it. As for my individual project I stated that I wanted to learn more of the anatomy of the brain and its functions and create diagrams of mouse brains as an end product. He mentioned that I could used the mouse brain atlas they had for any sort of referencing I would need and also mentioned other potential minor projects in the next weeks including assays of mice and making sure that by the time we left the lab we should both be able to run our own Polymerase Chain Reaction. At the end of this lunch I felt like I had a lot of concerns and worries lifted off my shoulders and felt certain that I would manage to make the most of my time while being here at the laboratory.