Student Research at Duke

It just happens that I’m writing this post after completing my second week of research here at Duke University. This week has been pretty hectic, and I haven’t really had time to update. I tried to go back and add in pictures to my previous entry, but for some reason, the software wouldn’t let me update it. Weird.

Anyways, here’s the picture I promised last week:

The picture above is of a embryonic stage 21+ Red-eared Slider Turtle. Though our lab doesn’t specifically study them, Dr. Blanche Capel’s lab in the Cell Biology Department gets a bunch of these little guys each year. They’re interested in sex determination of these turtles (their sex is determined by temperature; above a certain temp, they’re all female, below, they’re all male). But since they’re only looking at sex organs, they have all these left over turtle parts. As such, since I’m studying sensory development in various organisms, I was free to look at the turtle heads that they don’t use. So recently, I’ve been working with turtle heads, in addition to the molecular biology experiments I had already started. And, as such, I’ve been working non-stop, hardly having 20 minutes to eat lunch (I’m even going in tomorrow, Saturday, to finish something up).

Moving on, do you know what I LOVE about science? I love the feeling of having a problem, and working your way through it to find an answer. I honestly believe that science and most things in life, actually, are about the process. Life isn’t about the end result (death), it’s about what you do when you’re alive. The same thing applies to science. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have results and publish a paper as much as the next Howard Hughes Summer Research Fellow , but I take pride in knowing that whatever results I achieve, it’s because of the hard work, long hours, and weird dreams I have about my research (yes, I have dreams about research…. that’s not weird… right? ).

I haven’t really made any major errors in the lab, and some of my work is coming back with decent results. It’s been a long week, and unlike last week, I haven’t really been cooking dinner. Mostly, I’ve been eating out or mooching off of others. Research is no 9-5 job. I come home at random hours and often don’t feel like cooking. It’s good though, since a few of us fellows have just been trading off the cooking responsibility. Each roommate pair will cook about once a week, we can go out once, and there’s always some sort of free food at least once a week. For example, tonight, a bunch of us got together at Lulit and Wendy’s to celebrate Wendy and Upom’s birthdays:

I’m having a blast, both in the lab and out.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.