Follow the adventures of one of our students participating in a
semester-long research endeavor.
5 September
My first day (4 Sept.) was almost overwhelming. Even though I had driven around the massive campus the night before, I still got lost and was almost late to the orientation. I showed up with a minute to spare, but I was certainly not the last to arrive. After the New Employee Welcome Orientation, we - the student interns - went to another meeting detailing our requirements. We then separated and met are respective mentors for the duration of our appointments.
Being that this is the fall semester, there are only six (6) interns from the SULI DOE program compared to the hundreds that arrive for the summer semesters. The student lodging I am housed in is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, living and kitchen; and I have it all to myself. In the summer this would be at maximum capacity. The other 5 participants are all male, 3 of which are housed next to mine. The other 2 commute. I haven’t had a chance to get lonely; it’s been way too busy for all of us. I feel as if I’m starting off with a true internship experience, rather than a “summer camp” atmosphere with everyone here not my age or with planned weekend activities and more.
I met Dr. Bhattacharyya and was introduced to her assistant, Andrea. I was given a desk in the same office as Andrea, a computer, and background journal articles all written with Bhattacharyya as the main author. I am currently working on getting through this information, my online training (which I must complete before entering the lab), and just learning to get around. I was also present in their weekly strategies meeting. They both started listing duties for me to complete or have as goals. I was getting thrown into it full force, but I’m asking questions and learning as I go.
7 September
Daily life is already getting easier. I know what I have to do, or what they need done, that I can do within my capabilities. I’ve already discussed updating the cover sheet for individual participants’ folders to be more inclusive now that there is an array of information now available at their fingertips, or soon will be. Next week I’ll begin my training in the assay. It should be a relatively easy, or straight forward, procedure. I can’t do anything with the smoking machine until I’ve completed the carcinogens online training. But that is not scheduled until 25 September. That should be alright though considering the large number of blood samples in the collection waiting for me to analyze them.
Life is also getting easier in the lodge as well. I’ve been here for almost 5 days now, and I have most of the appliances fixed or improved, and cleaned. Tomorrow, my neighbors (the 2 guys) and I are going into Chicago to do some exploring on foot. Should be fun. My only concern is the weather. It is drastically different from the hot and dry weather of Georgia. There has been at least one spontaneous, scattered shatter each day. I’ve quickly learned to keep an umbrella with me at all times.
10 September
Chicago was a beautiful city! It also helped that we had great weather. David, one of my neighbors, led the way with the map. He even calculated that we walked more than 10 miles Saturday. We went to the Navy Pier, a few of the beaches along a walking / biking path, and to Millennium Park and others. We walked the “Magnificent Mile”, but I didn’t get to really go shopping since I was the only girl with two guys. I didn’t want to push them into it, or end up going by myself.
19 September
I finally had my first day IN the lab. I was training with the assay. Because of the precision of the steps and the time needed to do it right, I was in training with Beth all day from 9:30 to 5:00, straight through and no lunch breaks. All of this, just to run 8 samples. Of course, it’s just training. We were working with blood that had already been analyzed so that we may compare my results to previous results. The spectrometer we ran the samples on is not a simple spectrophotometer. It was an atomic absorption (AA) spectrometer. I watched Beth prepare the standards, and start the machine. I am interested in training on it. That may be in the future.
The next step is for me to run a blood sample under supervision without direct interference and maybe some guidance. Provided the results, I will then be allowed in the lab by myself to prepare the samples for the spectrometer.
I’ve been working a lot on the computer doing more administrative work. None of their participant data from the beginning has been put into an Excel spreadsheet for easy reference, data sorting, or participant control matching. I’m almost completely done with the folder cover sheet that goes with each participant. It is still under editing from Andrea and Dr. Bhattacharyya. Once as that is complete, I will fill in the sheets for each participant.
I’ve completed the abstract for the Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium held here at Argonne. Provided the abstract is selected, I will be presenting the results of the summer interns’ work. This alone has provided me with more background information absorbing than just reading several journal articles. I feel as though you could ask me anything on the basis on the research that I could essentially give you an answer right away. But I also know there is a lot more information that I still need to take in and understand.
The hours I’m allowed to spend in the building are restricted because no employee of ANL is allowed to work in a building alone, not even in an office. Safety, as it obviously should, comes first. They do not want any accidents to occur out of eye or earshot of a witness that can call in cases of emergency. I can’t bring the work home with me because the files have participants’ personal information we keep in a locked file cabinet. So, weekends are free to go wherever. I went to my uncle’s in Wisconsin who I have not seen since Thanksgiving of 2005. I will not see my parents of sister until the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, so he is the only close family I have. Several nights I find myself in a Panera Bread so as to do personal things on the internet. I have secondary applications due that I cannot do in the office because of the constraints.
But now that I’m officially in the “wet” lab training, I’m becoming more active in the office and things are definitely getting more interesting…
14 October
I have been non-stop busy, so bare with me as this may be out of order.
My wet lab training went in a 3-step series in which I trained one-on-one, supervised, and then unsupervised all with blood samples previously run for comparison purposes. After excellent results, I started on the unanalyzed samples. Another researcher introduced me to the Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer (SpectrAA), however I will not be running it. She then runs the samples I prepare through the assay and gives the results to me. I transfer the data to an Excel Sheet, and calculate the Cd concentrations of the original sample. I have to admit during the supervised session I got very nervous, as the instructor was very “nitpicky” even as I was doing the steps correctly. For example, she actually took a disposable pipette from my hands to show me how she opened them because I was deliberate and slow in my actions in opening it; I didn’t just rip like her. It was things like this that not only got annoying but nerve-racking. Even with my nerves, I still produced sufficient and reproducible results. Maryka was very pleased with the outcome. My unsupervised went much more smoothly.
Since the end of the wet lab training, I have had multiple assay days that ran just as smoothly. I had a few minor errors that I recorded. Participant 11’s results came out extremely high as the instructor (who previously made me nervous) who had designed the assay pointed out to me. Yet the results were consistent, obviously not due to a one-tube contamination or assay procedural error. I offered to go ahead and run the calculations, but she pointedly told me that they were wrong and not to bother though my point was that results were results. I have also set up an Excel Sheet so that the AA results can just be typed in and the percent recovery, standard deviation, error, and whole blood Cd concentrations are automatically calculated. So I crunched the numbers and participant 11 was definitely high. However, a previous run on another blood draw day by another researcher also showed that the participant was already on the higher end of the developing spectrum. These results will be analyzed more closely later after more assays, but for now its just data.
I am also in the middle of crunch time for several items due at the end of this week. The abstract that I wrote on the work completed by the summer interns was accepted for presentation at the 18th Annual Undergraduate Symposium held here at Argonne. I was nervous about knowing the material. However, after the City Wide Bone Group meeting in Chicago, I am a little less nervous. Maryka invited Andrea and I to the meeting being held a Joe’s Seafood – where there is really good food. Anyway… We brought three posters with us for the poster session. I had to stand next to one of them and answer questions for the viewers. After getting started, I impressed myself with as easy as it was to discuss the information on the poster with which I had familiarized myself with for 40 hours a week over the last month. They had a presenter over dinner that I had a little trouble following because the research had so many different parts and was very in-depth. I had so much fun and saw several interesting posters on the various studies being done with human bone health. It is a very hot topic of research in regards to public health.
My carcinogens safety training has been postponed to the end of October. I cannot train on the smoking machine until after this training. In the meantime, I will continue with the assays. I have also been assisting Maryka with another mouse study. She had been collecting fecal samples from mice on a low calcium diet prior to and after the diet administration of cadmium. We separated the fecal samples from the collection pads into pre-labeled, pre-weighed, oven dried vials. The samples were furnace ashed for 96 hours to remove organic matter. The samples were diluted in 10 ml of 1N HCl overnight to allow for complete dissolving. We then prepped the samples for analysis by flame level SpectrAA. The dilutions were a 1:10 dilution of Milli-Q water and then a 1:10 dilution into 0.1% La(Cl3) and 1N HCl for Cd analysis, and 1:20 dilution into 0.1% La(Cl3) and 1N HCl for calcium (Ca) analysis. The results have been calculated and ready for analysis. Looking at it, there was an increase in Ca release within the first 72 hours as expected. It was exactly as Maryka was hoping to see.
Outside of the internship, I went into the city again last weekend with my neighbor. We went to the John Hancock restaurant and lounge for an early lunch and to see the famous view of the city. The view was amazing. We could see out into the lake and over the city in an almost complete circle. The Water Tower building (where the Macy’s is located) also has amazing shopping and was 8 floors of it. We then went to the zoo. For a small, city zoo, they had a good variety of animals and specials. I especially enjoyed the lions and polar bears. Thankfully we had good weather for the day as it has been up and down between the low 80s to the high 50s in the matter of two weeks, and then back up into the low 70s. I’m going crazy trying to figure out how warm or cool to dress for the day, especially since I only get 7 channels in the lodge. If I miss one weather report then I miss them all.
I’m sure that I have more to say, but I cannot think of what else. So I will leave you with that.
19 October 2007
I am in charge of arranging the heel bone scanning with the study’s participants. At first, I had to hand-type each of the differences on the letters, but then I re-discovered the joys of Microsoft Mail Merge! The great thing is that it links over to my ANL e-mail account and send out the letters. The first day I had two no-shows due to one being out sick and another with a last minute meeting; the latter of which I still haven’t been able to reschedule. The second day went without any glitches and we received all copies of previous scans for a raw data listing.
I have been spending a lot of time with the data and computer work. On the Excel Sheet, I found a mistake in my standard deviation calculations. This affected several other worksheets because there is a calculation sheet, a listing sheet, a sum table sheet, and a t-test sheet. So to avoid future calculation errors, almost every sheet is connected and I only have to change one value on one sheet and then everything following that changes. It took me forever to set up the sheets and to get the calculations typed in sufficiently. Once as that was complete, I was able to import the results into my midterm report and abstract and submit them to SULI well ahead of schedule.
In the lab, I prepared mice fecal samples for analysis on the flame level SpectrAA. We were measuring calcium and cadmium concentrations per gram of fecal dry weight to show the increased release of calcium as an effect from cadmium. The results came out as expected with an increase in calcium release within 24 hours after gavage.
30 October
This has been a very crazy week. Though yesterday was Monday, I had my days confused and thought for sure that I had missed my carcinogen training that was truly held today. I’m thankful I did not miss it as it was the one that had been re-scheduled already once before. Later this week (on Friday) I will be presenting at the symposium. I have also been looking ahead and trying to schedule all the remaining assays for urine and blood, and of course the serum that has yet to be started. On top of that, the carcinogens training was to allow me to train with the smoking machine which it now looks like there will be no time to test the cigarettes. I will be squeezing these assays in until the day I leave, so only a portion of the results will be available for the final paper due at the beginning of the last week of my appointment. I think I’m going to go crazy.
I am also trying to organize another set of heel bone scans. I would have to be present at these to obtain the results. This makes my available time all the more crowded and hectic.
The more time goes by, I find myself looking forward to the Thanksgiving holidays. The lab will be closed and I will be going to my grandparents’. I miss my family who I am used to seeing on a daily basis. It has been since the beginning of September since I have last seen them. Thankfully I am so busy to keep my mind from straying. This past Saturday, I went to a Halloween party with a few friends that I made here. I had so much fun with meeting new people, dancing, talking, and laughing. Being the only girl in the SULI group has made this a little hard because the guys are constantly going off on their own doing “guy” stuff. We’ve had a few group activities, but no one can replace the friendship of another girl. Hey… I need a girl’s night out, too. And that’s what I finally got with the party. I won’t go into any of the details of the weekend to bore you. Let’s just say it gave me my second wind to finish out the second half of my appointment.
Before I end this section, I will address to questions that I have had time to consider.
Last time I corresponded with Dr. Bodri, he asked if I would go into another internship again. If I had more time, and was not pushed to get so much done in so little time, I would gladly go into another internship. I am truly enjoying this experience and taking in everything that it will be worth in my future, but still there is pressure. (When is there not in any work setting?) I can receive a majority of the blame for the pressure that I’m feeling. Maryka is not so concerned with getting every single assay done because the study is still ongoing for another year. Between now and then, she will have a spring student and one or two summer students. But with the backlog of serum samples, cigarettes, the training that comes before, and the required papers, they will be lucky to get done half of what I got done. I am here for a full semester; they will only have 10 weeks. At eight weeks, I have completed my training in the classroom and in the lab, completed the midterm report and abstract, scheduled a round of heel bone scans, attended blood draws, completed a large number of assays, learned how to prepare blood, organize the freezer, learned how to run the SpectrAA with and without help, and the list goes on and on. I certainly would not have had time to complete a final report at this point, but luckily I have another 7 weeks.
Would I recommend anyone else to do a semester internship over a summer internship? There is a load of benefits to this over a summer internship. You get about 50% more time, experience, and “expertise” on the study on which you work. There are very few students who are willing to give-up an entire semester of classes. That’s what makes the full semester internship so much easier to get into. It is still competitive and just as important as the prestigious summer internship, but during the fall / spring you can actually get something that you want easier. The “down” side is there are less people living on site, so there are less social events for a group of students. But this too can be turned into a benefit – I don’t have to share my room or my food, which makes living expenses cheaper with less clean up of other’s messes. There are still other students here for you to meet and hang out with, and you can always go off site to make friends. To do the semester internship, it just takes careful planning and summer classes to make-up for what some might consider “lost” time. But it is really worth it.
28 November
So it has been a while since the last entry and I have been busy the entire time. In the lab, I have been doing assays almost everyday, performing maintenance on the SpectrAA, and performing the appropriate calculations. The furnace tube had to be replaced and Maryka and I were both learning how to do it because Beth was out of town due to family reasons. We realigned the needle, but then with the following assays it was becoming unaligned. Of course we found that it was unaligned after trying to figure out why our results were coming out all skewed… it was very frustrating at the time. Now we both know better and what to potentially look for when things go wrong. After learning all about operating and maintaining the SpectrAA, I think any other machine would be equally easy to learn. I remember learning to run the IR in Organic Chemistry and it not being too difficult.
I gave my presentation on the research at the symposium at the beginning of this month. (I do believe I have mentioned preparing for this in a previous entry.) I would not say that I was nervous going into it. I was scheduled early in the morning and only had to watch two presenters before me. The anticipation was the worst part. Once as I stood up there and started talking from memory and experience, I did great. I had a few questions at the end that I easily answered. Of course, I was happy when it was over, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. I had kept telling myself that I knew the material by now and I was talking to a group like I would at a swim meet – I coach swimming and so this made it easier, not the whole “imagine your audience naked trick”. No thank you! I will stick with the thoughts that it is as easy to talk to the audience about the research, as it is to teach a group of kids all about the breaststroke or butterfly.
The holidays went great. I went to a Halloween party with some friends and had a great time. For Thanksgiving I met my parents in Ohio at my grandparent’s house. I was very happy to see them. I had not seen them since the beginning of the internship.
Back in the office, I have been struggling to get some of our participants scheduled for their heel bone scans. Some never pick up their phone; some take forever to get back to you after several attempts and by the time they do the date has passed. Thankfully I have one more to participant to schedule. So long as no one misses his or her scheduled appointment this time then the first round of heel bone scans will be complete.
It seems as though I should have a ton to write about, but considering I’ve been in the lab most of this last month and learning the SpectrAA, there really is nothing more to say.
1 December
It is COLD! This morning there was snow, very dry and powdery. It actually wasn’t that bad when I walked outside in it. But after doing some shopping, it changed from snow to sleet to rain. Between stores, my car windows actually iced over the rain was so cold. It is still raining, and I expect it will freeze overnight.
I finally have something outside of a normal assay day to report.
Yesterday, Friday, I tried a double-double assay day. A double assay is where I run two assays simultaneously; a double-double assay is where I run two double assays back to back. I was the one who decided to try it this way in order to get more done. But it was a really long day. I didn’t take a lunch break and it still took me a little over nine hours to complete everything. The second assay definitely took longer than the first. I honestly don’t think I want to run the assays like that again. I was brain dead by the end of it and tired of the pipetting and numbering. Plus, there is no time left in the day to complete other necessary work. I think future planning will include just the double assay days. I also believe the quality of my work was lowered a bit, but the I have not fully analyzed those results yet. I did not make any obvious mistakes, so it might have been just me being tired that makes me think that something could have gone wrong. Also, we were having issues with the SpectrAA again, so the samples sat uncovered and in the open for over 3 hours. I was doing heel bone scans while Maryka was running the machine. We are not sure if we had sample evaporation yet as they also sat overnight capped and in the fridge. Even these conditions have resulted in evaporation, which is why I was concerned about them in the open.
Right now, I am caught up on all current inventories of participant samples that have all three draws available for analysis. That is a feat in itself! When I run an assay, it consists of the recovery standards and two participants with 3 dates each. I’ve completed a “blank” run which will determine the average Cadmium contamination contributed to our samples through the use of our equipment, all the way back to the needles used in the actual blood draw. I have also completed an assay that compares plasma and serum cadmium concentrations. I will calculate those results on Monday. This will then tell us if we need to continue drawing both plasma and serum, or just one over the other if they have similar concentrations.
I had heel bone scans all day yesterday, so I was constantly driving around from one Jewel Osco pharmacy to the next. We really tried to keep the locations convenient for our participants, not so for us – specifically me. Don’t get me wrong, it was really nice to get out of the lab and off of the computer and interact with the participants. I had a really nice day and the participants we have are really pleasant to talk with. Back in the lab, if I did not have my music, I think I would go crazy in the silence. Of course I only keep one earphone in and the other out so that if anyone comes in to talk I can clearly hear them or if there is an emergency I can hear what is going on.
Really, the only “bad thing” to these heel bone scans have been the no-shows that I’ve had to deal with and reschedule. When someone misses and I have to reschedule, it may really mess up my assay planning. Sometimes I have the assays planned up to two weeks in advance around hood inspections and prior to that all the training I had to go through. In fact, I now have to watch for the OSHAS inspection, as they are only required to give a one-day notice of their arrival. Even so, the lab is expecting them any day now.
I have TWO weeks left! It really seems unbelievable. It has been the fastest, most interesting semester I have had yet. I’ve learned a lot about the bone and bone resorption, especially as it pertains to the study. We have a lot of third and final draws for participants at the end of this week, which will make my final week even busier with more assays and more results to include in the paper.
It seems I have forgotten to mention in my last entry that I attended RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) at the McCormick Center. I spent a majority of my time in the educational and research exhibits (mostly poster presentations). Seeing all the posters has inspired me to try and design one provided I have time. I am still trying to get through the paper around everything else. I have been trying to attend RSNA for over five years. I got in as a guest to my uncle. They have a lot of new equipment on the market, including an upright MRI. They had research showing that the conventional flat MRI missed up to 50% of slipped disks than that was caught by the upright that allowed the spine in it’s natural weight-baring state. The first day I was mind boggled at everything I was seeing. The technical displays were huge and in some cases overdone in order to capture your attention. The vendors are there to sell their equipment and need that attention. I think that is why I thoroughly enjoyed the educational exhibits. It was more relaxed over there.
