Week 9 - Creating My Poster

It’s crazy how fast my time at this internship has gone. Everything is wrapping up now. I spent most of the week preparing my research poster since I was presenting to my lab group in our meeting on Friday. I’ve never made a research poster before so I was a bit confused at first. Once Rachel helped me get started I began to enjoy the chance to get creative. The lab meeting was an opportunity to practice what I would say, and to get feedback on my poster. I got a lot of great comments on it, so I’m feeling confident that I’ll be ready to present next Friday to more people.

Rachel and I redid the gradient pHstat experiment so that we could get better data and make sure the patterns we saw in the first run were patterns and not a fluke. I got to take breaks from working on my poster to do more time points. The computer lost power during the first night of the experiment so we had to restart it, but after that it went well. The rest of my time was spent attempting to keep up with all the acid washing that had to be done. Rachel and I have used a lot of syringes to sample from the pHstat so they build up quickly. After running these experiments for a couple weeks I am thoroughly tired of washing syringes.

One of the best parts of the week was going on a field trip to the OHSU primate center. I and some other interns got a tour of where they keep the monkeys to breed and we got to see the outside of the research buildings. We weren’t allowed into most of them because the research they are working on is too sensitive. I previously did not know much at all about animal research, particularly primate research, and hadn’t even thought about it much, so the trip was very educational. I enjoyed learning more about it.