Grad Diary 12/22/09

I am now officially home for winter break.

Holy Cow, what an end to the semester.

I mentioned in my last post that my project was shifting gears. Add onto this the fact that my data looked promising enough to be added to the grant proposal Una needed to submit by January 3rd, and suddenly my workload tripled overnight (that was two weeks ago). And of course, I was excited about what was going as well and really wanted to complete things before the end of the semester, so I was totally complicit in the increased workload.

This past week was my last week of experiments, and the earliest I left the lab was somewhere around 7:30pm. I actually distinctly remember one night the only reason I left (around 9:15pm) was because I needed to eat something and perhaps sleep before classes the next morning. It was so crazy that on Monday, during lab meeting, I basically diagrammed on the white board everything that needed to happen on a day to day basis and started delegating certain experiments/tasks to people so they would all get done. It was like my own little project with Jenny suddenly expanded into a rather ridiculously large lab endeavor, and I somehow got the task of overseeing it all. Did I mention that I was supposed to be studying for my Cell Biology final during this time?

Somehow, things got done and I was able to organize things in a way that would let Una and the lab move forward, but last week was easily the most stressful week of my entire grad school experience thus far.

This experience proved to be very instructive, though, in that I got a ton of support and encouragement from the entire lab, and everyone was ready and willing to chip in to get things done, especially since we were going to try to include my stuff in the grant proposal. Last week summarized pretty nicely how my overall lab experience has been in the O'Doherty lab; I have gotten along extremely well with everyone in the lab, I have felt completely supported and encouraged, I have been pushed scientifically and technically, and I learned a lot. It has been a truly fantastic experience in Una's lab this semester, but I am still really happy to have some vacation time...I've earned it.

Oh, and yesterday I had my final exam for Cell Biology. It was pretty much the same as the previous two, and compared to what happened in lab last week, it seems almost inconsequential, ha ha. Hopefully I will get my grades back around New Year's?

I'll be taking a break from blogging for a while. Look for my return once classes start up again in January! Have a happy holiday season and a great 2010!

Grad Diary 12/2/09

Up till now I've been attempting to isolate HIV linear DNA through a TOPO-cloning technique. I think I mentioned previously that after coming back from a conference, Una was very excited about moving on to an alternative technique which we had been considering, called the Hirt extraction, which is a method of isolating small nucleic acids within a background of high-weight chromosomal DNA. Theoretically this technique could be applied to HIV as a method of isolating non-integrated species of HIV DNA.

I am now shifting gears to trouble shoot the method, and in addition, we will now start looking at 2 LTR circles, a non-productive non-integrated HIV DNA species that may or may not be indicative of productive/latent infections. There's a lot to work out and I am a little concerned that I won't get as far as I would like before the end of the semester (just a few weeks!). Fortunately I am getting a lot of help from Jenny so hopefully things will go well.

Oh, and there's always the final exam for Cell Biology coming up...