It’s hard to pin down a typical day for me in the Groh lab, because every day brings with it new challenges. Normally I arrive around 10:30, after breakfast and a lecture courtesy of one of the Howard Hughes Program’s guest speakers. Then the first thing to do is always assessing the current situation of the project, which normally involves checking my journal to see where we left off, perhaps with a technical problem or a conceptual obstacle. The team and I either all tackle problems together, or sometimes split up to handle several at once, but either way the components of an experiment are hugely varied. Within the last week alone I have spray painted 3 out of 5 fingers on a pair of cotton gloves, torn apart every computer in the LSRC offices looking for spare parts and actually managed to collect some data right at the very end. In between all of this running around and problem solving I eat at some point and can end up going home anywhere between 4 and 5, depending on where we stand in the project. There are weekly lab meetings which I have started to understand more and more. Initially, I felt lost in a sea of words like colliculus and afferent, but now I’m deciphering the jargon and beginning to appreciate the great amount of clever collaborative work that a research lab is built upon. Tomorrow I’ll be presenting my project to the grad students and post docs in the lab, hopefully impressing them with what I have so far, and not making a fool out of myself in the process.
