new students

I admit that I often get bored at the lab. Sometimes I have very little to do, or am waiting on a particular thing to finish incubating.

It is 1:15 in the afternoon and I have not yet done science. But, I am a t-shirt and "New Student Kit" richer.

Today was the second in the "Summer Student Seminar Series." Basically, a bunch of summer interns sit in an auditorium and hear about new/interesting research. The speaker who was supposed to come in today cancelled, but they had a different researcher step in. He was actually quite interesting.

Last week, at the seminar, I only nodded-off three times. Today, there was zero nodding-off. The speaker knew how to engage the audience (students, mostly) and he asked questions. Correct answers warranted a Snickers bar. I had three correct answers, but only needed one Snickers. He spoke to us about Lupus, and specifically how it seems that he accidentally infected mice with it. This is currently (as I write this) giving rise to a new model of Lupus. As I said before, it was quite interesting.

At the end of the seminar, there were student intern t-shirts to be had. In addition, New England BioLabs prepared welcome kits for us. It contained a lot of crap mostly. There were posters, catalogs, and lots of other things that I have not yet gone through, but most intriguing there were samples of reagents. In fact, they basically sent all the things necessary to do a PCR or Polymerase Chain Reaction (read about that in earlier posts). Also, they gave me a retractable super-fine tip Sharpie permanent marker. I always like goody bags.

Now that the seminar is over, I am waiting for the next 41 minutes, 46 seconds for something to finish incubating.