First Few Days

What’s in my head the first few days of my internship?

This summer I’ll be working with Daniel Kim, a PhD student at Yale, on an ongoing project of his. I’ll be helping with a variety of experiments using techniques in molecular analysis, human cell lines, and animal research.

I began my internship a few weeks ago, and so far it’s been a pretty steep learning curve. After completing my training, I spent the first week catching up on the experiments and getting adjusted to the lab. There’s definitely a lot to get used to! I’m learning the protocols and techniques from scratch, which is difficult, but thankfully I’m in a great learning environment.

So far, I’m really enjoying working with the mice. This involves intraperitoneal injections (inject into lower abdomen), oral gavaging (insert into stomach through esophagus), blood drawing, anesthetizing, euthanizing, and dissecting the mice. I anticipate that most of my work this summer will be centered on the in vivo mouse experiments, which I’m looking forward to.

In general, I have a lot to learn and get used to. I’m very optimistic that this placement will be great for me, and am looking forward to the work ahead.