I can’t believe it’s the last week already. This entire summer has felt like a weird dream. The fact that I was able to form so many new relationships while also learning more than I could have imagined in getting to conduct research. Our final posters were due Tuesday for a final review and printing. I can’t say that I wasn’t glad to finally be done making final little tweaks and edits to the poster; that final press of the send button ushering in a wave of relief. However, right after, I was already sad, as this poster was the culmination of this summer’s work, so with its completion, the realization that I wouldn’t be in Oregon in a week was a sad shock of reality. I found myself becoming conscious of the fleeting moments, from my last time sorting eggs, to locking up the lab for the last time. By the end of the week, I had processed leaving and how thankful I was for all of the different experiences I had this summer. Presenting my poster was a great experience, and a lot less intimidating than previously anticipated. All of the mentors, Richard specifically, always emphasizes that you are the one who knows your project the best. But I don’t think it is until this moment, actually explaining your formalized research, that this statement actually makes sense, at least for me. It’s primarily from the stress of research and actively putting the poster together, but this same thing that makes the poster session so easy. I’m so glad we had several opportunities to get critiques and edit throughout the poster making process. I think they definitely contributed to how smoothly things went. I’ve added some pictures of little things I saw this week . I’ve also added a picture of my poster, I did spend numerous hours on it (and I think it’s not too bad lol). Well, I guess that’s a wrap on the summer. Thank you, George for mentoring me and Maureen for helping me out with everything.
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Week 8 has been quite the week, from consistently editing my poster to continuing injections and imaging for my second project. I can’t even count how many times the content, image sizes, and overall layout of my poster have changed. At this point, I’ve elected to treat it as the ever-shifting culmination of my summer’s work, with the intrinsic property of always needing edits. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed being able to put all of my work together in a way that really highlights what we found this summer. My improvement in how long it takes me to inject the eggs itself is only proof of how much I have learned and grown in the past 2 months lol. While working on posters took up a large part of my week, there were a few highlights worth mentioning. For instance, George’s graduate student Erin brought in a whole bucket of blueberries (which were delicious by the way), a nice and unexpected mid-week pick-me-up. Also, this past Saturday me and some of the other REU interns went to Hall Lake, which is a beautiful lake with sand dunes that let you look out to the ocean. I’m surprised I even swam out as far as I did (for those of you that know my swimming skills they are sub-par) (a little ironic for someone working in marine biology but what can you do lol). Even still, this week has been a nice mix of work and relaxation. Wrapping up everything has been hard, along with the bittersweet idea of leaving Oregon. I have built a lot of really cool relationships with all of the other interns; it’s going to be so sad to have to say goodbye to all of these people that have made my summer so special :(. Well, until next week for my last entry…
I can’t believe that after this week, it’s only two weeks until I’ll be back home in Atlanta! I hate to say that it feels like everything is winding up, but with poster preparations and presentations in the near future I fear time has caught up with me. I remember saying, “Hey, even if I hate it, it’s literally only two months, summer’s gonna fly by,” but you never actually think about how it feels when the end is actually approaching. This week I’ve been working on preparing a small presentation for Saturday, where along with the other REU’s, I will be talking to some Oregon high schoolers about what I have been working on this summer as well as how I got from high school to where I am now. I’m super excited to share as I remember being in high school and having absolutely zero clue as to what my future career would look like.
At the start of this week, I went on a series of plankton tows, to try and collect some microorganisms to use in some final experiments with my larvae. However, finding the fast-swimming microorganisms proved to be a little more difficult than I thought, so I wasn’t able to complete any trials of my larvae tethered to see if they would react to other organisms as stimuli.
A little later this week, George, Maureen, and I injected some eggs with the protein encoding mRNA to make both the microtubules of the spindle apparatus as well as the chromosomes fluoresce under the microscope. However, due to some timing issues, we didn’t really get to see anything of use :(. Don’t worry though, I’m attaching some videos we took over the last few weeks of how these caffeine treatments affect both first and second meiosis. We treated eggs with caffeine both prior to meiosis I and meiosis II, to see if we would get a breakdown of the spindle apparatus. Not only did we see that, but after the breakdown of the spindle, when we washed the eggs with filtered sea water, we saw it come back. Eggs treated before either meiosis I or II, once washed out, were even able to continue on to expel a polar body (the end of meiosis).
In addition to my videos, I just wanted to include a couple pictures I took throughout the week; me at the docks, along with some pretty pics of the sky. Well, until next week…:)
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