I don't know how much more love this heart can lose,
and I'm dying,
dying from the exit wounds.
- The Script
-+-
So I think I had a cute day in the laboratory today.
I very casually told the other undergraduate in the lab that my classmates were playfully teasing me for being a huge nerd, and my lab technician was outraged. I guess I said it out of context, because I earnestly was being truly nerdy – I was just gushing about my awesome lab report format, and how I was freakin’ stoked that I took photos of my agar plates so that my report could look legit. I really 100% deserved that "nerd" comment.
However, my lab members took, “My classmates were teasing me that I’m a nerd!” as that my classmates were insulting me, and my lab technician became very defensive of me, “WHAT? CHRISTA, NO. YOU’RE AWESOME. You know what, fuck these kids! Watch them say that when you’re their boss!” The grad student that I was shadowing gave me a similar pep talk, except she did so with substantially fewer amounts of entertaining vulgarity and moral outrage. So I was pretty taken aback, not only because I thought I was making such a casual comment, but I mean, wow. It was already enough to realize that my lab members were fond of me, but there’s still yet another kind of warmth to learn that they’re protective of me, and to see them all get ready to just leap out of their lab chairs and fight whoever dares to cross their precious "wondergrad."
Afterward, the other lab members treated me to some coffee while I was running my protein assay, and I just felt like a SCIENTIST. “Oh, yeah, I’m so busy and tired running this long experiment, so I would love if you could get me a latte!” And I always perceived coffee as undergraduate duty (even though they’ve never made me get them coffee, as much as I really do offer), so it was really something when the lab members wanted to get me coffee!
I also actually really love it when the entire lab is bustling with nonsterile experiments, which is what happened today – our tech was doing cell counts of bone marrow samples, my post-doc and I were running an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay while I was shadowing a cell stain, and another grad student was doing transplant analysis. The neat thing about nonsterile experiments, is that we're not all separated because we're in the various sterile rooms. Instead, we all sit at our respective lab benches and chat with each other across the room while we’re all pipetting reagents and cell samples. All of us in our lab coats, just driving science forward!
I contributed to the conversation by inspiring the aforementioned rage, and by cheerfully telling everyone that it was my sister’s first day in her lab at Stanford, and I was wondering out loud about how her first day was going. I told them, “Yeah, she’s normally really really sarcastic, so it’s really something to see her so enthusiastic and sincere!” While looking at his mouse analysis, a grad student replies, “So basically, she‘s the complete opposite of you.” He immediately transitioned into a flourished impression of me, “WEEEEEE TIME FOR SCIENCE, TEE HEE HEE~!~!~!~!” This, of course, inspired my lab technician to also do an impression of me, followed by, “Right, THAT’S what I still had left on my to-do list. ‘Make fun of Christa.’ Sweet! Thanks Christa, good day!”
I concur. Good day!
except for the part where i got zero time to study for my midterm, but that's a story for another day LOL D: