Singing YOUR Beautiful Song

A pretty old song we sang.. In the church I attended previously.
Wow, really good old memories!

what kind of life?

Today, I tried to go down to the lab earlier so I can run the gel early, in order to have time for a second double digestion followed by another gel electrophoresis. Then, I can transform my dearest piece of work into pet bacteria cells, and wait for results to appear tomorrow!

Unfortunately, the lab ran out of DNA ladder so I couldnt run the gel, till late morning. Which meant, I wasted quite some time... getting up early and all, and I have to extend the dateline. grrrr...

Recently, this whole lab experience has been prompting me to give further serious thoughts about my future. Frankly, I am enjoying my time in the lab. Perhaps it's the personality thing. But I have read, heard and infered, that life after a PhD would more or less mean trading most of your life for the lab. To put it nicely, it's for the furtherance of science. To put it awfully, it's selling most of your social life. Well, I don't know at the moment, but I did request to my PI that I would like to do a UROPs (Undergrad. Research Project) for the next 2 semesters under him, and this would contribute 8 modular credits to my overall graduation requirement.

A couple of benches away from me, I have a friend who's currently pursuing her PhD. She just came back from a 1 month Europe getaway, and she so kindly showed me her photos. Hmmm, I really wish to go free and easy travelling with a couple of friends. Anywhere... where the weather is un-Singaporish will do. After all, it's the company that makes most of the difference. (the weather does play a part too) And I've got to save enough money for that too.

Not enough money... how to go?

about PIs

Yesterday, a friend of mine doing her honours in NZ sent me an article about a career in science. A portion of it contained a small discussion about Principal Investigators (PIs). And since I've just recently gotten to work with a PI, I thought it to be very relevant, and hilarious. This comic strip was taken from the article published in Nature. Really interesting...

Courtesy of http://dentcartoons.blogspot.com/

laborious work

Today's Day 2 of my attachment with one of the Professor in NUS.

What I'm basically taksed to do is Recombinant DNA work, where the PI (Principal Investigator) has tasked me to make a vector containing a special gene and Green Fluorescent Protein gene. His work is on the immune system, particularly on cancer genes and how the body's immune system fights off tumour cells. He's really so kind as to demonstrate and explain step by step to me the required techniques. I'm currently starting off real slow now. So basically, I have ALOT of free time. Yesterday, the only thing I did was to mix the vector with Restriction Enzymes. Thats all. Today, I set up and ran the gel, and extracted the DNA from the bands. I think by t0morrow I would have seen most of the required techniques and protocols being demonstrated, dephosphorylation and ligation, and I'll be left to carry on more or less on my own. The project shouldn't last too long, hopefully, if things go well. When I get the desired product, I'll learn how to do DNA sequencing and PCR. Then he would task me on some other project.

Currently, his lab has 1 full time staff, 3 honours students and 1 undergrad research project member. Really thank God that I got to work in a lab where everyone is all so friendly and helpful. Heard from a few of my friends about their not-so-nice experiences with PIs.

The PI himself is from Switzerland, and he's such a down-to-earth, humble, friendly professor. Can see that he really enjoys teaching and explaining stuff to us undergrads, and the occasional chats, despite all his meetings and other things he needs to do. The honours students and the full time staff also willingly explain to me what they are doing.

The really good thing about attachments is that there isn't a need to write reports. I just hope I can acquire as much lab knowledge and practical techniques this break, and discover if I'm really into research. So far, it has started really well and I enjoy what I'm doing, but I suppose it's still way too early to judge now. Perhaps I'm a little crazy, trading off my holidays for this, but I think it'll be worth it.

Guess what I found in the lab toilet? A research paper on top of the toilet bowl closet.