There is no typical day in lab for me just yet. The only thing that remains constant is that I’m in lab from about 10 am to 4:45 pm, with a lunch break sometime in between. Besides that, I could be doing a variety of tasks, depending on what needs to be done at the moment for the lab.
Some days, I am testing new batches of electrodes for their quality. This involves using a signal generator to run a sine wave through an electrode in saline to ensure that the electrode is both measuring signals correctly and not leaking. Other days, I am measuring the impedance values of these electrodes using two different softwares. This measurement serves as another way to check if the electrodes are good for further testing. Following this, I usually need to write a MATLAB script that extracts and compares the data using various graphs.
The majority of the time, however, I am doing further research on the methods that the lab uses in it’s experiments. If I am waiting for something to do, I read up on the various techniques that were used to measure the effectiveness of older electrodes and I try to think how to translate those methods to the newer electronics we work on. Other times I just look around the lab and see devices and hardware scattered everywhere and I try to figure how some of the stuff works by reading documentation found online.
Maybe in the coming weeks as I work towards collecting data for my project I will have a more “typical” day in lab, but I do not mind at all that heading into lab every morning is a new adventure to me!
