The research experience here at OIMB was wonderful. I felt at home in this science village that’s tucked away in it’s own safe haven between forests and ocean. The Young lab, where I conducted my research, was a very motivating place to be, full agendas and plenty of experimentation. I feel more apt to be a part of the science community after seeing how much work and learning I was capable of in the Young lab. On our last day here, we had our poster session. All of the interns presented their summer research, while standing in front of our greatly detailed posters we hand crafted ourselves. It reflected many hard hours of work, from new scientists who needed a little healthy investigation from professors who came by. Having other scientists critique your work is both terrifying and also very beneficial. This is because the setup for the experiments was majorly up to me, so I had to make sure everything was up to par. I had a main question I was trying to answer, and had to research the exact ways to go about what I needed to find. I set up everything according to scientists who did similar research before me, while adding my own improvements along the way. The intern pack stayed very tight throughout the summer, impressively so. We all had a great time, and OIMB provided a foundation for safe, fun and professional work.
Working in the Young lab meant having support at all angles, with a great push to do more with what we had. I learned there's almost no limitations with what all you can do if you have a good team, and divide work efficiently. I want to thank OIMB and the entire community who was there to support my research, and was there to answer my many questions. Everyone has truly been so kind, and I believe I am a better scientists because of this summer experience.
0 Comments
Our research experience here at OIMB is coming to a close for the summer. We only have a week left, and there’s a big part of me that wants to continue working on this project. Luckily, I will be coming back to OIMB maybe as early as spring, and I am hoping there is space and time to continue on similar research projects.
I am also looking forward to coming back to visit all the wonderful people I have met here, and I hope to keep in contact with the interns throughout the years! There has been talk about visiting each other across states. I hope this is true, This week has mainly entailed a grand buckle down of concentration. Even when I am working day and night, I find that there is so much room to improve on preforming efficiency. I look forward to doing more research beyond the internship, this entire experience has me very excited for marine biology research! This week we finally went snorkeling! We needed S. purpuratus adults, so we dove and captured some for the experiments! The visibility was outstanding. I have been tackling some large projects, and in retrospect the final product should only require about a week or two worth of data, but the whole journey of refining my experiments to get polished, publishable data has been a grand task. So here’s a pro tip- if you have to count a million larvae, have as many people on microscopes as possible. We started out our experiments by having only one or two people on a microscope and then running an assembly line, everything set up for the scope viewer, and all they had to do was call out what they saw. “32 cells” “Another... Another ...” “...Blastula!” Would be Craig, Matt and I calling out cell stages during data collections. We found that with more helpers, suddenly, our work days were flying by in short hours. I got most people on board with the idea of making slide preparation much faster, too. It felt like a great accomplishment. Dropping the amount of time we took picking out 50 larvae for a slide, and reduced the amount of slides we had to prepare. This time saver, combined with the improvement of distributing lab helpers around each task wound up making data collection days go from 12 hours to 1. This was great, especially when nearly everyone there was volunteering their time to be there and help, they also seemed so much more enthusiastic to help clean up afterwards when lab days were shorter! This OIMB REU program has been a wonderful mix of scientific learning and I am coming out a better scientist because of it. My experience here has included building the important skills of assembling and directing teams of people, offering a happy attitude to spread throughout the lab, and making a professor happy with my work. I feel very fortunate to have had this experience, and can’t wait to apply my knowledge to future marine biology related work. |
AuthorMy name is Kaylee Wilkinson, I am both a student, and am currently employed by Lane Community College in their wet lab for marine biology research. I serve as a coral husbandry assistant and tank-scape artist. I enjoy sciences where you can dive into the "unknown", being in Craig Young's lab is perfect for such interests. I am thankful for Dr. Young and his graduate students to have taken me in as an REU intern this summer, they have been very enjoyable to work with! Archives
August 2019
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly