Yesterday I started my new job at the lab I will be working in for the summer. The last couple of days have been super overwhelming, and I still can't get my mind to relax. If this post doesn't make any sense, it's because I'm completely brain dead.
I work at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which is separate from the main campus of JHU. I can walk down my street a few blocks and catch a shuttle to work in the morning that will take me to the hospital for free. On my first day, I went up an office in the division where I will be working where they told me to go to get started. Ann, the lady I met there, gave me a bunch of neat things (lab notebook, some folders, office supplies, etc.), and a ton of paperwork to fill out. I was then also introduced to the other student that would also be working with me this summer, John. John is way cool. He is so nice, and I really couldn't have asked for a better person to get to work with. And, he's familiar with the lab, and the area (he's a Hopkins student), so he's been able to answer a lot of my questions.
John and I will be working with Geetha. John took me down to the lab after I was done meeting with Ann, where I then got to meet Geetha, and have a look around the lab. It didn't last long, because we then had to go to a meeting with the whole Stanly group (where I have my internship from) where we had a lovely introductory meeting. Sam was there, as well as all of the folks that I got to meet back in February in SLC from JHU, so it was nice to see some familiar faces.
Following this meeting, John and I went to have lunch. We went down to the cafeteria. It was crazy there!! It was really small for the amount of people they had there, and it was just so crowded, and everyone was just so busy! It definitely gave me the incentive to pack my lunch today. It was a good time though.
We then got to go to a meeting with the psychiatry lab division. The meeting was kind of boring, but really just because I didn't know what was going on. Hopefully by the end of the summer, all of these meetings will get better as I know what's going on more and more. However, maybe I won't catch on to most of this medical jargon in a summer's time, and these meetings will just forever go over my head. We'll find out.
Following all these meeting, I got to do some training. No, not cool lab training. Lame, computer, university work policy training. It was sooooo boring. I almost died. Okay. Not really. But really, it was so boring. I'm just glad that's done now.
Work today was much better. When I got there, the first thing that I got to do was...(can you guess?) more training! But this time, it was cool. I got to do some animal training! I got to go to the building where they keep all of the mice and rats at the hopspital for research. It's in a basement of a really nice builidng, and it's about the size of a football field. It smells awful, and you have to wear shoe covers and medical gown lookin' things. The tour though, was way long, but cool. Any animal lover would have ABSOLUTELY HATED it. They keep they mice in small tupper-ware looking containers on racks with minimal food and water, and they just breed them and feed them, and record what needs to be done when and they do it. When a mouse needs to be killed, they euthanize it (yes, they showed us how to do it. It's simple), and they have a ton of refridgerators full of dead mice. It's cool. I like it. If you have any love for mice, don't ever go there. Ever.
Later in the day, we got to make lots of different solutions for some experiments that we are going to run tomorrow, and then we learned how to slice some mice brains. We just watched Geetha do everything today (which, I will admit, was totally lame), but tomorrow we will get to do some of it ourselves. I'm really excited for that!
I really like what I get to do so far. A LOT of it is still really really over whelming, but I hope that it will get better with time. I'm so grateful for the people that I work with, namely John and Geetha, they are the best people I could have asked for! I really like everything so far. We'll see what tomorrow brings... :)
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