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!
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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...
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...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Grad Diary 11/25/09
I'll be heading home for Thanksgiving soon. I've been spoiled at Ithaca, where we got the entire week of Thanksgiving off. This week I had my second cell biology exam on Monday evening, which went pretty much the same as the first one (clocking in at about 1hr 10min). I probably would have gone home yesterday but things in lab have been going pretty crazy, largely because we have moved in a new direction technique wise and there is a lot to be done before the end of the semester.
Surprisingly, they STILL had a lecture this morning for cell biology! Not only is it right after we took our exam on Monday, it's the day before Thanksgiving! I only came this morning because I wasn't able to go home till today anyway. Not surprisingly, instead of 40-50 students there were not more than 20 students in class today.
Anyway, I'm glad that's all over and can't wait to be home. I could really use the break.
Surprisingly, they STILL had a lecture this morning for cell biology! Not only is it right after we took our exam on Monday, it's the day before Thanksgiving! I only came this morning because I wasn't able to go home till today anyway. Not surprisingly, instead of 40-50 students there were not more than 20 students in class today.
Anyway, I'm glad that's all over and can't wait to be home. I could really use the break.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Grad Diary 11/19/09
I just took a trip up to Ithaca this week to talk about graduate school, and it was a great trip. I had made a trip back to Ithaca at the beginning of the fall to visit some friends and old professors. While there the director of the Honors Program, Bob Sullivan, asked me if I was interested in making a return to trip to talk to the first year honors students about applying to graduate school. I thought about it and over the next few weeks we worked out the details. Since I was already going to be on campus I e-mailed the department chairs for biology and chemistry to see if they wanted me to do the same for them, and they were thrilled. So, Tuesday night I found myself driving up to Ithaca and checking into a hotel room already paid for by the honors program and enjoying the irony of being invited back as a "guest" when I haven't been out of school for more than six months. It was very surreal...and kind of cool.
My talks were at noon (for the honors kids) and at 4:00pm (for the science kids). I spent the morning and afternoon between those times running all over campus stopping into professor's offices and catching up. It was very hectic. The talks themselves went well, though I will be honest and say that I was more excited and gave a better overall presentation to the science kids, because I could focus exclusively on my own experiences (which were still pretty fresh). The turn out was small, but I wasn't expecting much (having recently graduated). Still, the students who did come seemed to have gotten a lot out of my presentation, and actually one of the professors asked if i would send him a copy of my presentation for him to use with his own students, which I thought was pretty awesome.
It was a great trip all in all, and I am looking forward to making more in the future, especially once I've gotten some research under my belt and can actually present some science!
My talks were at noon (for the honors kids) and at 4:00pm (for the science kids). I spent the morning and afternoon between those times running all over campus stopping into professor's offices and catching up. It was very hectic. The talks themselves went well, though I will be honest and say that I was more excited and gave a better overall presentation to the science kids, because I could focus exclusively on my own experiences (which were still pretty fresh). The turn out was small, but I wasn't expecting much (having recently graduated). Still, the students who did come seemed to have gotten a lot out of my presentation, and actually one of the professors asked if i would send him a copy of my presentation for him to use with his own students, which I thought was pretty awesome.
It was a great trip all in all, and I am looking forward to making more in the future, especially once I've gotten some research under my belt and can actually present some science!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The HMGS Certificate Program
In addition to my regular course work in the Cell and Molecular Biology program, I opted into a special "certificate" program at Penn sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This program (or similar variants) exist in a few other schools around the country (I think there are a dozen of us in total). The program, currently called the HHMI Med into Grad Scholars Program, of HMGS. Basically the program is offered to interested graduate students in the biomedical sciences who want to get more exposure/get involved in more "translational research."
"Translational research" is one of those phrases currently in the biomedical community that means different things to different people, and is such a buzzword in the NIH that you can't find a single grant proposal without this phrase in it. Because of that, it's almost become a bad word, but generally speaking translational research expresses the linking together basic science research with clinical/medical practices. In my mind, translational research is supposed to be a close collaboration of the two, and a perfect example is a clinician who works on breast cancer in the hospital, and who also does basic research on the underlying mechanisms of breast cancer as a means of developing new therapeutics (this is actually a real example, I will talk more about him in a moment).
Anyway, what the heck does that mean for me, a lowly grad student? Basically the program functions similar to a minor in undergrad, in that you take some specialized courses that complement your training and which encompass this "translational research" motif. You also spend two or three weeks shadowing a clinician in a field of your interest during a summer to get real life exposure to the field, and there are a few talks and symposia associated with the program as well.
There are four classes involved, one each for the four semesters leading up to your Prelims. I am currently taking the first one, which is a journal club type class where we read two papers each week, a student presents one of the papers during the class and we discuss it. Specifically, each week has a unique clinical topic, and we are assigned a "basic science" and a "clinical" paper about it, and a resident expert in the field comes in as well. For example, my first paper was on large diffuse B cell lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells in very watered down terms). My paper was a clinical paper that looked at using a proteasome inhibitor as a way to treat a particular subset of these patients with a unique molecular profile (I will spare you the details, although it was quite interesting). The other student that day presented a basic research paper that described the signaling pathways involved in this subset of cancer patients, which also explained why targeting the proteasome (normally a ridiculous idea as a therapy since you would screw up all sorts of stuff) actually made sense (in principle anyway). Other topics included obesity, HIV, color blindness, etc. It's been pretty cool.
The other classes include a cellular immunology course (I can't wait!), a basic physiology course, and finally a more advanced class that will look at the cellular/physiological pathology of certain diseases. They are all meant to be ways to expose us to more clinically relevant topics and help us apply our backgrounds towards the clinic.
In addition there are speakers from Penn who come in and talk to us about their research. The first speaker was a clinician who was a breast cancer specialist (as I alluded to above). In addition to his normal clinical practice, his lab was working on eliciting immune responses against breast tumors, and he already had some clinical trials in the works for some of the therapies that had come out of his lab and collaborators'. It was a really cool presentation and got me even more interested in doing basic science that would be more directly involved in human health.
I think it's a pretty cool program and so far I am really enjoying the exposure. Programs like these are not very common in most universities and it's an opportunity I am glad to take advantage of.
"Translational research" is one of those phrases currently in the biomedical community that means different things to different people, and is such a buzzword in the NIH that you can't find a single grant proposal without this phrase in it. Because of that, it's almost become a bad word, but generally speaking translational research expresses the linking together basic science research with clinical/medical practices. In my mind, translational research is supposed to be a close collaboration of the two, and a perfect example is a clinician who works on breast cancer in the hospital, and who also does basic research on the underlying mechanisms of breast cancer as a means of developing new therapeutics (this is actually a real example, I will talk more about him in a moment).
Anyway, what the heck does that mean for me, a lowly grad student? Basically the program functions similar to a minor in undergrad, in that you take some specialized courses that complement your training and which encompass this "translational research" motif. You also spend two or three weeks shadowing a clinician in a field of your interest during a summer to get real life exposure to the field, and there are a few talks and symposia associated with the program as well.
There are four classes involved, one each for the four semesters leading up to your Prelims. I am currently taking the first one, which is a journal club type class where we read two papers each week, a student presents one of the papers during the class and we discuss it. Specifically, each week has a unique clinical topic, and we are assigned a "basic science" and a "clinical" paper about it, and a resident expert in the field comes in as well. For example, my first paper was on large diffuse B cell lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells in very watered down terms). My paper was a clinical paper that looked at using a proteasome inhibitor as a way to treat a particular subset of these patients with a unique molecular profile (I will spare you the details, although it was quite interesting). The other student that day presented a basic research paper that described the signaling pathways involved in this subset of cancer patients, which also explained why targeting the proteasome (normally a ridiculous idea as a therapy since you would screw up all sorts of stuff) actually made sense (in principle anyway). Other topics included obesity, HIV, color blindness, etc. It's been pretty cool.
The other classes include a cellular immunology course (I can't wait!), a basic physiology course, and finally a more advanced class that will look at the cellular/physiological pathology of certain diseases. They are all meant to be ways to expose us to more clinically relevant topics and help us apply our backgrounds towards the clinic.
In addition there are speakers from Penn who come in and talk to us about their research. The first speaker was a clinician who was a breast cancer specialist (as I alluded to above). In addition to his normal clinical practice, his lab was working on eliciting immune responses against breast tumors, and he already had some clinical trials in the works for some of the therapies that had come out of his lab and collaborators'. It was a really cool presentation and got me even more interested in doing basic science that would be more directly involved in human health.
I think it's a pretty cool program and so far I am really enjoying the exposure. Programs like these are not very common in most universities and it's an opportunity I am glad to take advantage of.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
