Student Research at Duke

Wow! I can’t believe that I have been at school for just three weeks; it feels like I’ve been here for much longer. I had a very relaxing rest of the summer post-Howard Hughes at home for about a month. A bunch of my relatives came to San Francisco to visit us so we took them to Chinatown and had delicious dim sum and took a tour of Alcatraz, which was possibly one of the most exciting things we did- we got to walk around the jailhouse and learn about the different escape attempts, which I found extremely fascinating. Other than that, I mostly hung out with friends, my parents and sisters, and of course ate a lot of good food. And now I’m back at school, going to class and hanging out with friends…only now all hang out sessions occur in the library, usually at around midnight. But I love being back here; I’m in a triple this year right on the main quad, so everything is really convenient. I started back in lab on the first day of school and am there as an independent study student. I’m currently finishing up the project I worked on from over the summer. I really love going to lab- many of my fellow Howard Hughes-ers and I have come to a general consensus that it would be amazing to just work in a lab for the rest of the three years and attend classes on the side. It is such a relief from my day to go into lab and immerse myself in the project I am working on; it’s a good break from all the lectures and studying. However, just from the first three weeks of classes, I know that I need these classes in order to fully grasp everything that is going on in lab. I am in Genetics and Cell Biology and Organic Chemistry this semester, and I am finding the information to be very interesting- stuff that I like learning about- and extremely useful as well. There are some things about genetics and certain signaling pathways for example that I couldn’t grasp when it was first explained to me in lab or was discussed in lab meetings that I am learning about in lecture. And these are only the first three weeks; by the end, I’ll learn so much more that I can apply to my lab work.

I’m going to get back to studying for the aforementioned classes, which I have put off for long enough. My plans for lab are to retrieve my last set of data from the confocal microscope once it gets fixed and to Metamorph analyze them. Hopefully, this will be done in time for lab meeting on Monday because I am schedule to present. That’s all the lab update there is for now. And I don’t think I’ve said this before, but if anyone is thinking about applying for this program for next summer, I would be happy to share my opinions (which is of course that it was an amazing experience and that you should do it) so please feel free to send me an email.