My pride still feels the sting -
you were my everything!
- Train, 50 Ways to Say Goodbye
Honestly, I should've known we weren't meant to be the moment he asked me to skip a Train song. That should've been the biggest red flag!
ok fine that album had so-so moments but their newest album is so money
freakin' love train
-+-
"What are you going to have Christa do?"
"Everything."
"Everything?"
"Yeah, I'm just gonna go relax on the beach while she does all of my experiments."
-+-
Warning: Nerd Christa ahoy!
I sat there in front of the Cryostat for hours trying to perfect my sectioning technique, and hoping to demonstrate my "knack" for learning new technique.
The Cryostat was a machine not available to us at UC Merced - at UCM, if we wanted to section tissue samples into thin layers for histology, we had to drive to the closest research facilities in the area; usually, this was two hours away in UC Davis.
I now had the great privilege of having one only a couple of yards away in the room across the hall. I diligently took notes as I received Cryostat training, and proceeded to slice away at an extra sample of mouse brain. I carefully laid the sample out, and adhered it to a microscope plate.
It was consistently rewarding to "successfully" slice a sample. The "success" was that things would constantly be perfect, at least until the moment that I check my tissue under the microscope and see a microscopic bubble in the center of my tissue sample. I would give a frustrated, "Rats!" before I continued to try and try and try again for an additional hour and a half. After all, the tissue is the entire point of it all!
After being kicked out of the lab at 6 pm to encourage me to catch some rest, I would continue to scour the nearby earth for wi-fi so that I could continue looking up ways to optimize my Cryostat technique via grad student forums and online research discussions. That bubble was really bothering me.
It's been a while since I've been this fervent for learning a new skill - it was completely different from anything that I was challenged with in my home lab, but as I carefully cut the tissue section with the flywheel and pulled it from the rest of the brain with a small brush, I was also thankful for the dexterity given to me by a year's experience in tissue culture. It was really a skill that built upon my prior research experience while truly being a technique that would literally be impossible for me to currently learn at UC Merced.
I have now worked two days in the new lab, and I have already learned a completely different world from embryonic stem cell culture, as I have instead begun to instead culture virus and bacteria and as I watch collagen cells repattern into neuronal cells. It's a sight to behold!
I hope that tomorrow in the lab, and the rest of summer to come, will be just as awesome and bodankulous!
Next goal: Get to know my lab members! This lab is nearly three times as big as my home lab, and I'm definitely getting lost in the funk and still forgetting everyone's names. I truly hope to be less of a tiny fish in a huge ocean, and more of a valuable asset to the lab team!
(i am also trying to coin "bodankulous")