Placement: the beginning

I'm Tomek and last Friday I officially finished my second year of my Bachelor in Genetics at the University of York, taking the last exam of the year on Developmental Biology. Even though the weather in my home country, Poland, is really summer-like now and many of my old friends would now go sunbathing, I decided to stay in York until my student house let expires and gain experience in lab.

Everything started in January when I applied for a summer internship project to Dr Sangeeta Chawla, who works in my Biology Department in York. The idea of working with neurons at the molecular level, including studying transcription factors, was spot on for a future (hopefully!) molecular geneticist. A nice bonus was the funding by the Biochemical Society that I managed to be granted.

Today, Monday 4th July, after one weekend of holidays, was the first day of my summer placement. Sangeeta's group consisted of two people before I came - her and Becky, a final year undergraduate finishing her project, who I have already known for a few months. This really made the first day as good as it could be, because Becky could take me through transfecting neurons step by step, right from the start. After getting my personal lab notebook and getting familiar with H&S rules, I got my own (beautiful!) nervous cells in a dish and transfected them with liposomes - which meant I brought into life the knowledge from the lectures on creating transgenic animals from Applied Genetics module. So there seems to be a point in going to lectures during my degree! Even though I was as fresh to the lab group as Morrison's fruits, I actually did proper labwork from the first day, under the hood, with ethanol disinfecting and careful handling live cells. I even got my own plastic tray for keeping Eppendorfs in the freezer! And I have the first protocol written down in my lab notebook. Definitely not the last one.

The day is not over though. Tonight I'm accompanying Becky with her time course experiment, which means we need to go to the lab at 10pm, 2am and 6am! Excited! In a few weeks, this might happen again, but then I will be the one needing company...

Not to get too bored, I got a review to read from Sangeeta, so that tomorrow, after I get enough sleep after the night visits to the lab, we can thoroughly discuss my experiments. My neurons are now ready, so why keep them waiting? It should all get in the full swing on Wednesday!

I'll try to blog as often as possible, to share all my feelings about the placement and keep the updates on my progress. I'm sure the next posts won't be that huge, I just wanted a bit of introduction here. Hopefully you won't get bored!

Tomek