Jose and I were left on our own.
We were to start the protein expression protocol on our own with out
major guidance from the scientist. If we had any questions we could
freely ask and were given a response. We were bothy really
enthusiastic about running the autoclave and setting up our media to
start cultures to work with today. To our dismay, the autoclave was
not working :( Jose and I had our day all planned. The scenario
reminded me that things especially in biology do not always go as
expected. The nonfunctional autoclave would move us a bit behind of
our planned out schedule. Luckily, after attending Dr. Salvesen's
talk and then meeting with the rest of the cohort (to dissect the
journal article we will be presenting for journal club at UCSD) we
went to the autoclave and a kind person had already placed our flask
in the autoclave. Our day was saved by this act of kindness and we
successfully started the cultures.
We were invited to attend the Sanford-Burnham Cancer Center Postdoc/Grad Student Retreat at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. This was a very interesting opportunity. Not only did I learn about the amazing work the investigators conduct, but I also learned several presentation skills and techniques. I was fascinated by the level of professionalism of the presenters, in my personal opinion there was no distinction amongst the postdocs and grad students. I could tell that the institute takes great interest and care for providing proper presenting skills as well as speech training to the students. Although, hearing 10 postdocs/ grad students’ talk with the same tone and pace did get tiring at the end of the day. I felt that some of the presenters lost their personality while they were presenting, but as soon as they were answering questions their characters surfaced. I appreciate the ease and simplicity with which the presenters introduced their work. I was captivated by the amount and variety of lab techniques used in their research. I also really liked the clean data. Although they had lots of data, it was presented as a piece of a larger beautiful story that each of them is writing as their research progresses. The sponsors of the event had booths with material stating the products their respective companies offer. I gathered some very interesting posters about various pathways implicated in cancer and the techniques you can apply to possibly study a component of a pathway. These posters are great and I think they will be very useful to me in the future as a PhD student.
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