Week 2:
Initiation

June 8, 2021

June 6, 2021

Work Week Whirlwind

This week was an absolute whirlwind. I had not been able to do more than a shadow in the lab until this week because I had issues registering for the required training. Once I finally registered, I was able to learn lab techniques in a professional setting. I saw differences between the lab I am working in now, which deals with biohazards, and the chemistry and biology labs at school. While it is important to dispose of chemicals correctly at school, the restrictions and regulations in my work environment are much more intense. It is really interesting to compare a normal chemical environment to one of biohazard waste, and it is preparing me for a future working with such waste.

I finally finished my training mid-week, and I ran an essay on my own! It is a three-day process with two overnight incubations. During this time, my mentors and coworkers taught me what their daily lab work consists of. The opportunity to finally be hands-on in the lab really made me realize how much I do enjoy lab work. At school, lab classes are essential to my biochemistry major, and I think I have always taken that for granted. Sometimes I don’t even want to go into the lab for the day. Here, I learned that I do enjoy the work, and I enjoy challenging myself to learn and to understand my and other’s work more and more every day.

A new perspective:

I met a doctor from the lab next door who was helping a member in my lab with an assay that he is familiar with in his research. His willingness to help showed his passion for his profession, and for teaching others. The graduate student, who started the same day as me and with who I am learning the ropes, and myself commented on how great of a teacher he is. It was humbling to meet someone so knowledgeable about every single question I asked along the way.

He showed me how to keep calm and trust my abilities as a researcher when I was thrown into the middle of a protocol that two of my lab members could not finish. I was receiving different instructions to deal with the very limited samples we had collected, so there was no room for error, and I was honestly extremely nervous. He let me explain to him what I was doing and why I was doing it, and he questioned why I was so nervous. I had a lab full of people to help me if I needed it, and three years of undergraduate work that has prepared me to work in the lab. I was “A-okay”. He was not worried and told me I shouldn’t be either, we would all be in it together. This was a new perspective I had of lab work. I  was under the illusion that in professional labs, everyone had their own project they were working on and that no one was involved with each other. He made me see that lab members of the same lab, and even the lab next door, work together daily. One of my professors actually preaches this to his students: we can’t know everything, and the best way to learn and perfect our work is to talk to other scientists. Seeing this in action made a lab career much more attractive to me. I can’t wait to see what preconceived notion I had about professional labs is knocked down next.

A New Life at Home

On another, completely unrelated note: my roommate moved in this weekend, and I have been in lab the whole time, so I have only spent an hour with her. It is so exciting and nerve-racking living with someone completely new, with a totally different background than me. I am excited to get to know her, and hopefully have someone who has gone to VT for three years show me the college life of Blacksburg, VA. (Oh, and she has a dog… yay!)