Week 6: Mid-Internship Presentation Week

     This week was a very eventful one. Other than reading from documentation or literature regarding CompuCell3D or ovarian development, I had two workshops, successful simulation runs, and a mid-term presentation. The first workshop was about our mid-internship PowerPoint presentation. Sheree Watson led the talk, and she spoke about what topics we can discuss. She presented to us a worksheet that had five areas of focus: title, background, objectives/goals, methods/data, and preliminary results/next steps. We each used these areas to write about our projects, then to discuss them with some CMOPers as a practice run. This really helped me to get my mind oriented for the upcoming presentation.
    Before the day of the presentation, Karen and I were able to work out some kinks in our simulation. We wanted to produce 40-45 primordial germ cells (PGCs), while starting with six, in order to simulate embryonic development day 6.5-7.5. For a while we couldn’t figure out how to get the PGCs to divide to 40-45. Karen noticed some differences with a working model and I made the changes. However, we still weren’t able to produce more than six PGCs. She alter mentioned about capitalizing some of the letters in the code to see if it would create what we wanted; but she wasn’t sure why that would help. Yet, based on her statement, I went ahead and capitalized those characters, and eureka! It worked! We generated more than 50 PGCs! Karen and I gave a each other a high-five! We were very happy to get to that point. She also suggested that I take out some of the conditions in the code so as to produce all green PGCs instead of some blue-colored ones. I later changed it in my dorm and it created all green cells! I would later use that result in my presentation. That presentation went well, by the way. Later the next day, Karen offered some suggestions so can better prepare for the final presentation.
    On Friday, we had another workshop which involved Cynthia Boshell and Matt Andrus. They spoke to us about how we can take our science background into policy-oriented careers. Fortunately, we spoke about how we can work in agencies for the greater good policies, but also how I can combine the work with technology and helping others in non-agency related work. This was a very productive talk where I was able to address some personal concerns and about how I can make some of my goals into reality.