Work and Weekend

I had my first day of work on Friday, and I learned a lot. My first impression: they are extremely laid back and casual. My second impression: they have LOTS of money! When I got there, my supervisor, Laura, came down to get me and show me up to the lab. The first floor is the clinic (where they see patients) and the upper floors are the research labs. She was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap- you see what I mean by casual. We went up to the 5th floor and she showed me around the lab. It is huge! They have probably 15 benches and lots of little rooms off to the side as well. She showed me all the fancy machines they have. When I worked at Sun Health, one of my jobs was to extract DNA from blood. This takes about 3 full days of work. At NJH, they have a machine that does the entire process! They have so much equipment and the latest technology. I was introduced to the research assistants, and the PhDs and MDs. I was introduced to about 8 PhD and MDs. That's how big the lab is. Every single person is under 40- even the PhDs. I would bet that 90% of them are under 30 even. The whole time she introduced me to everyone, they would joke around and it seemed like they all got along so well. Everyone treated each other like peers. It was hard for me to distinguish who was the supervisor and who was the supervisee (if that's a word). I was also surprised that nobody was wearing lab coats.

Each person told me a little about what they are working on. NJH deals mostly with respiratory illnesses, and that was consistent with what I heard. Some of them were working on epigenetics which is a field of genetics that looks at why some genes are expressed and others aren't. For example, me and my sister have the exact same genes- so why is it that one of us could develop diabetes or cancer, and the other wouldn't? It's environmental, and they're researching how the environment affects how genes are expressed. They do a lot of work on mice, so I imagine I will be as well. They clip the tails of newborns and use that to genotype all of them. They also do lots of autopsies of mice and work with lung tissue and peripheral blood too. I can already tell I am going to learn so much and I can hardly wait.

The part I was most nervous about was scheduling, and it worked out perfectly! I am working Mondays 2-6 and Fridays 10-5. That's about 10 hours a week which is exactly what I wanted. It seemed that they have had a student in the lab before, so I feel a little better knowing that they've worked with someone at my level before. I told Laura that I've done ELISAs, Western Blots, PCRs, and that kind of thing before so she said I may be doing some of that. I won't be doing autoclaving or washing dishes because they actually have a whole separate staff that does that!! They just drop off their dirty dishes in a bin and they come back clean and sterilized the next day. It's incredible the resources they have. The lab also has secretaries whose sole responsibility is ordering supplies and keeping track of the money coming in and going out.

After my first day of work, Daniel, Hope, and I packed up and we drove up to the mountains. Daniel has a fraternity brother, Erik, whose parents own a condo in Breckenridge (his Dad also happens to be a professor in the business school). It's within walking distance of the ski resort. We drove up in crazy traffic so it took us a while. I think everybody was taking advantage of the long weekend to go skiing. Once we got up there, Erik's girlfriend Veronica was making dinner so we all ate together. Some other friends from DU met us up there as well. They were people that I had met before, but don't hang out with regularly. It was fun to get to know them better and make some more friends. Hope and I drank a lot of wine and we ran to the hot tub and hung out there with our wine for a while. It is very uncomfortable to walk to a hot tub in 13 degree weather! I went to bed fairly early, perhaps due to my alcohol consumption, but everyone went to bed relatively early anyways. We had breakfast this morning together and all the guys went skiing while the girls went shopping. Around 3 we all went to this Mexican restaurant where they have $1 tacos and $3 wing baskets during happy hour. The guys were very excited about $1 tacos lol. So now we're back in Denver and recovering from our mountain adventure. Hope is at a party, Daniel is hanging out with some other fraternity brothers, and I'm enjoying the empty house :-)

I am going to really enjoy this long weekend. So far, it's been great!