Grades!

My grades were finally posted today. All As! But because there were a bunch of A-, my GPA went down a little. But it's still a 3.8. I am so happy! I want to keep up all As, but that's just going to get harder.

My first week of the internship is over. It has been so exhausting. I work from 8:30-4:30 everday, but because I carpool with my Mom it's more like 7:15am - 5:30pm. That's a lot of hours. And I have to wake up so early I am ready for bed by 10:00! I can't believe how much I have learned in just one week. I know so much more about working in a lab and following procedures and making sure everything is exact and accurate. There are so many rules to prevent contamination and all this stuff, it's insane! And my hands are all dry and cracked and peeling from changing out my gloves every few hours.

I really love the other people in the lab. We all get along so well and they are so nice. They keep reminding me that everyone makes mistakes and I shouldn't worry about it. But yet at the same time Dr. Walker keeps reminding us that this is real work, it's not just practice. It's important that we get accurate results because this is real research. It's so exciting!! I am really anxious to find out what else I can learn in the lab over the next 7 weeks.

Yesterday I got to work with Emily, the other head of the lab. She does work with real tissues and things like that. She taught me how to take brain tissue that was cut from mice and prepare it for mounting on a slide. It's a very complicated procedure that involves adding a primary antibody to attach to the target protein, then a secondary antibody onto the primary antibody, and then a solution called ABC onto that. Each time you have to wash it three times to wash off the excess antibody. So she explained why each step is important and the function of it. Then this morning I learned how to mount the tissue onto slides. It's really delicate work. The tissue samples are so tiny and I have to use this little tiny paintbrush to move it around without tearing it. We use a dissecting microscope to look closer at it. So that took me a really long time. Then in the afternoon we dehydrated the slides with ethanol and glued a coverpiece over the slide so it will keep for months. The dehydrating process involves dipping the slide in 10 different solutions for exactly one minute each so it takes about 10 minutes.

I don't know if anyone could actually follow that, but it was very tiny detailed stuff that took a lot of patience and concentration. But I got off a little early today which was nice. Tonight I am going to go to Tempe again and hang out with Evan and Daniel and other people. It should be fun. It will be nice to have a relaxing weekend. I need it.