CMS

so, admittedly i have been a bit slack on this blog lately, with nearly a month going by without a post. well that is not for lack of things going on; in fact it is because i have been rather busy. there will be multiple posts today, dedicated to different aspects of my life, and what i am doing at the moment.

first we are starting with my lab work at the Center for Marine Sciences. (which is where all the fancy lab pictures in this post are from) starting from the beginning, i am working with a professor (Dr. Bailey) who primarily focuses on algae and protists life forms found in the ocean. i was fairly excited to begin working in his lab, although it clearly is not my forte in the realm of biological studies. for the record, i am much more interested in the metabolic characteristics of chordates (things with backbones) and population mechanics within ecosystems (fancy way to say i like what big groups of animals eat). but i thought that it would be good for me to try something new, and out of my comfort zone, thus the decision to work in a phycology lab.

pictured: the hard work achieved in an algae lab

so to start off, i am the youngest in the lab, being the only undergraduate. there is me, a male PHD student who has been there since spring, and a female working on her thesis. the 3 of us, and the professor. so right away, i am outclassed, and out skilled. but almost more importantly than that, they all are passionate, and truly like and enjoy what they are doing. immediately, there appears to be a problem, but i don't like to give up on things easily...



i began working last week, and was relatively quickly thrust into something that i considered rather difficult. i had to extract DNA from tiny little things that were being grown in culture (too difficult to explain that sentence more). i've done similar things in genetics lab, and even AP biology, but this was a bit more in-depth, and a lot more accurate. at the end of the day, i got no visible results of DNA, meaning i messed up somewhere, along with the grad student that was teaching me. really not a horrible first day.

they let me play with dangerous chemicals!

that middle shelf is the dangerous stuff. i am good at messing up labs.

second day, i was tasked with doing a DNA extraction alone, and was reasonably confident given the instruction sheet and my experience yesterday. all was going rather well. i quickly found out that what i was doing, which required a great deal of concentration on my part, and was relatively difficult compared to other work i have done outside of school in the past, was the most basic thing in the lab. i soon found out what my actual work was going to amount into, and i had a bit of a freak out over it. here's generally what i would be doing:


This gets a bit technical. luckily enough, i don't fully understand what is going on, so the technical parts are impossible for me to completely cover. somehow in this lab we take data, either from nucleotides, or from amino acids (i am in the dark as to how we gather this data) and we have to convert the files over to a format that i am unfamiliar with, but is not that difficult to understand. then there is a database that we have to run out data against to try and find similar matches in other recorded organisms. this new, larger set of data is then put into 1 specific program that takes all the parts of either the DNA or amino acid and lines them up in a comparative graph manner. this them will have to be manually looked at to remove the separate parts that do not line up. this is a surprisingly labor intesive process for it having already been run through a computer. i must look through all the data points, which can be upwards of 5000 points long for a gene in nucleic acid form. after the data has been looked over, it goes into a different program, which then converts the newly "cleaned up" data into a phylogenetic tree. this tree then has to be manipulated in various ways, but that end part is not too hard; the program does it all for you. then, once all this is done, the tree must be submitted to the professor, and he can request a change in any part of the tree, making the whole process needed to be started over.



obviously i have overly simplified everything, but that is the basic picture of what i would be doing in this lab. not exactly my idea of fun, or something that i could see myself doing for the next year of my life. if i am going to be committed to a large project that i will be working on for all of my senior year and then presenting to a committee i would want it to be something that i am genuinely interested in and like doing.

 
thus, i quit.

the rubbish in question happens to be me due to my quitting, but that is irrelevant

i think it is better for me to get out sooner, rather than later when they will have placed even more responsibilities on my shoulders. i don't want to abandon anyone half-way through a project; i'd much rather quit at the start to save everyone there the hardship of dragging me along, and me the difficulties of trying to follow along and do things that i 1) do not understand  2) do not feel capable and comfortable doing and 3) do not have a great interest in doing. 

 i approached Dr. Bailey about leaving his lab, and of course he was very reluctant to let me. even going so far at the beginning of the conversation to say "no, i won't let you quit", which was certainly the laugh of my apartment later in that i was denied leaving... but he gave me a very supportive talk - you could tell he has kids because he started talking like a parent - about how he believes in me, and thinks that i can push through this initial hard stuff and that in a bit of time i will really understand what i am doing. i told him that it is all of the unfamiliar material, along with the lack of desire for me, personally, to study what he loves to study. he then told me to think about it for a week, and get back to him with a more thought out decision. unfortunately, i do not foresee changing my mind. i tend to be rather reluctant to quit anything as it is (i think the last time i quit something that was this big was 5th grade?), so the fact that i have considered it and made that my final decision should emphasize to those people who know me how lost and hopeless i felt in that particular lab. as kelly told me "[you should not be in a] project that does not make you feel like you are trying to climb out of a hole with stairs made of jello."

searching jello on tumblr tags gives lots of recipes for jello shots