August 6, 2022 | Looking back at my first week at Mayo, I am in awe at how differently I feel about the experience. I went from nervous, uncertain, and shy to looking forward to going into the lab every day, confidence in the projects I worked on, more confident in my career trajectory, and a gain of great […]

July 30, 2022 | The internship may be closing next week, but there was definitely no shortage of work to do this week. If I had sum up this week in a cute little package, it would be that this week was a review of all previous seven weeks put together, compiling all the tasks that we have worked […]

July 23, 2022 | If I had to describe a cute little theme for this week, paying attention to the little details would probably be what I chose. We did a lot of the same things I have talked about before (scoring and charting) but in slightly different ways that allowed me to gain a broader experience in this […]

July 16, 2022 | If I had to sum up this week in a few words, I would say it revolved around adjustment. The hypocretin project has been put in a temporary standstill for now, and the focus is now on the Charles Bonnet project, which is attempting to identify a link between Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) and RSWA. […]

July 10, 2022 | The week consisted primarily of shadowing Dr. St. Louis in two different clinics. The first was in LaCrosse at a smaller Mayo clinic, where I saw primarily epilepsy-focused neurology cases. I was also able to shadow him in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where there were no real themes to the patients that came in […]

July 2, 2022 | This week was full of exciting firsts, as well as some of the things I have grown accustomed to living in Rochester. Throughout the week I did score some files, as well as review some patent charts that we added, but as the week unfolded, it was wilder than I could have ever predicted! One […]

June 25, 2022 | We began this week completely putting the Gold Standard behind us and beginning our project: how does the level of hypocretin affect REM sleep without atonia (RSWA)? Hypocretin is one of the chemicals in the brain that controls the wake/sleep cycle. It helps us stay awake when we are awake and, conversely, helps us stay […]

June 18, 2022 | This week was all about preparing for the assessment of REM sleep without atonia (RSWA) scoring from polysomnograms (PSGs). The Gold Standard is an assessment used to judge readiness to score patient PSGs to determine RSWA severity for the analysis we are doing between narcolepsy and RSWA. In preparation for the Gold Standard, we used […]

June 11, 2022 | I arrived in Rochester to my residence for the next 10 weeks in a rainstorm at night. Happily, the morning perfectly juxtaposed the previous night, sunny and a perfect setting for what would be an enlightening first week at the Sleep and Neurophysiology Lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I found a room […]