(Ain't it Fun by Paramore)
It's been pretty low key, I finally took those pictures of the building I'm working at and of the apartment. And just fyi, if it looks messy to you it's not usually-I just didn't feel like waiting until it was cleaner.
This was my temporary desk for the week! Hopefully I'll get one similar buuuuuuut we'll see.
Here's a fantastic view from the fifth floor. There are pizza talks every Friday here apparently, yay free lunches!
This is the room where the pizza is served in and is on the same floor as the picture above. Along with the free food I think this area is where people are encouraged to eat lunch here and attend events here so that there's more interdepartmental communication/talks.
More of the fifth floor! There's a balcony, it's great.
The sixth floor is the animal floor! This is where I've been most of the week along with the third floor, I didn't take any other pictures because I wasn't sure what they would allow me to take pictures of for privacy reasons and in order to be respectful of the animals' rights. It's a lab floor that has areas sectioned off for rats and mice because rats are a natural predator of mice and if the mice are able to smell the rats, and vice versa, that could be a confounding variable in the animals' behaviors. So, it just makes the studies done here more valid. The room I've been working in has a large counter area across from the fume hood where the dissection happens, before we get into the room we also have to put on a full body lab coat, and by full body I mean this:
With booties that cover mah shoes, gloves for my hands and lab goggles for my eyes. It looks real great, it's like I'm a real lab person! Those of you who saw that snapchat know what I mean. Anyways, onto the next photo...
Here's what it's like on every floor basically as you come out of the elevators.
This is the ground floor lobby area! There's a cafe to the right of where I took this picture.
Right outside the building is where I board the tram to go home!
This is the main entrance, the building itself is relatively new (about 4 years old) so I'm working with pretty new equipment as well. The funny thing is that they are running out of space for things and people, so they're working on expansions and everything.
A pretty average day is me waking up at 7 or 7:30, going to work at 8 or 8:30 and then working until 4 or 5 at the latest. When I am working I'm labeling wee tubes for pieces of mice to go into, watching my supervisor and his student dissect the mice and run the nanochip tests. I assisted them with a nanodrop this week too! A nanodrop uses runs a current through a milliter of same and shows how many nanograms per milligrams of RNA is present in the sample. I feel like for some reason I've been running into a lot of physical chemistry, something I have mixed feelings about....
(Not Over You by Carolina Liar)
Not only have we been working with brains but also the adrenal glands (found behind the lungs or right beside the lungs) and the epididymis, where the sperm of the mice are housed. The sperm is where we are looking for RNA and is pooled together from all the mice in the same experimental group (as far as I can tell). There is a lot of me standing around and watching but I've also been able to pipette a bit, a pretty simple and basic lab skill so it was the least I could do:)
During the week I also had time to see the Eureka building, one of the tallest buildings in Australia. Here's what the view was like!
And I am super excited to go to Phillip Island where there'll be a penguin PARADE among other activities. It's something for students at the Florey and only costed me 70 bucks for the whole weekend (includes food and housing, so I believe that's pretty good).
This weekend I was also able to shop at the Victoria Market, similar to a farmer's market but it's one of the biggest farmer's markets I've been to, not including the market I went to in Tanzania.
So it's been a pretty eventful week and I have some pretty exciting things planned for this next one. I'll keep ya'll posted!
Love,
Syd
