Can we play the name game?

First day in my new lab! Annnnnd…….it was overwhelming. Let’s be honest—aren’t most first days?

I met Amanda, the PhD student I’ll be working closely with this morning, and she showed me around the lab. Although I had already attended a lab meeting, I hadn’t really gotten a chance to tour the facilities or meet all of the lab members.

I was completely overwhelmed. The last few labs and project teams I’ve been a part of have been relatively small- the Yin and Groh labs consisted of maybe a dozen team members, and my research team at Medtronic had only handful. Most of my previous lab spaces have been fairly small as well, generally consisting of one main room with perhaps 1-2 smaller rooms for specialty techniques, such as imaging or histology.  

The Swartz lab wasn’t like that. The rooms went on and on and on- office spaces and laser rooms, cell culture centers and wet lab benches. And the people! Amanda introduced me to far, far more people than I could ever remember, people whose name I’d really like to be able to recall, but couldn’t come close if I tried. If it were up to me, I would have had the entire lab go outside, sit in a circle, and play the name game. Hi, my name is Vanessa and if I were going on a picnic….

After I met the people I don’t remember, Amanda introduced me to Vero, the lab manager. Vero walked me through the lab safety protocol. From what I can tell, it’s a pretty strict, clean lab—conditions that often lend to good quality experiments and all-around better science, but can be a bit annoying to get used to.

I ate lunch with Amanda and another post-doc, Ryan. Here, I finally shifted to actually thinking and talking about scientific theory. Amanda and Ryan helped craft together my project proposal, and together, they explained what some of their individual goals were.  After lunch, Amanda and I met with Melody, the head of the lab, to gain even more clarity on the big picture of what I will be looking at. Finally, after days of background reading and lots and lots of questions, I was starting to get a clear of idea of what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.

Well, sort of.  That’s the problem with research, isn’t it? It’s easy to create a hypothesis and even easier to come up with a research question, but to actually design an experiment, eliminate unnecessary variables, and get the whole set-up to work? That’s the tricky part. That’s also the reason my day, aside from trying to memorize about nine billion new names, has been kind of overwhelming. After Amanda and I met with Melody, I headed to the Wave, dug out my good friend Google Scholar, and started reading more and more and more papers, trying to get a better feel for how on earth I was going to set up an experiment to answer the questions my lab was trying to ask.

French words of the day: poivron, oigon, champignon, ail, sel, poivre = bell pepper, onion, mushroom, garlic, salt, pepper. (That’s what Ben and I put in our spaghetti tonight. I would have posted photos, but it turned out pretty unfortunate, and I just can’t bring myself to photograph icky-tasting food.)