Typical Day in the Life of Laura!

Kim Petras and Taylor Swift sing to me as my morning commences with my 1.3-mile walk from Swift to Wilkinson’s 3^rd floor. A peaceful walk, not that tormenting hot midday weather, reminding me of home. At 10 am I arrive at the lab where the door is already propped open for my welcome. I peek into the culture room and usually see my mentor, YingYu, already at work; I wave to her with a smile and walk to my cubicle. I lay everything out: computer, protocols, my notebook, and my pencil. I’m ready!

First things first, figure out what the plan for the day is. Due to my project, each day varies a lot. Usually, it consists of changing the media of my plates, passaging the cells, and making vitronectin plates for the upcoming cycles. Other days can consist of learning skills or going with my mentor to perform flow cytometry for her project. On Tuesdays from 10 – 12 pm, we have our lab meetings where we each go around presenting what we have done in the last week and what we plan to do the rest of the week. My most important days are our Electroporation Days (or as we like to call it D-Day). On electroporation day, the protocol is a lot longer than the other days. This procedure takes me about two hours and is the most stressful because our cells keep dying after 24hrs 🙁 so we must troubleshoot the day after on why this keeps occurring (the fun in science and repetition!). On this day we prepare our cells to be electroporated, which means shocking them, to open their cell membranes to engulf the modRNA. Once electroporated, we plate them on their respective media and wait for them to differentiate into endothelial cells (unachieved thus far). I usually have lunch with Amelia around 12 – 12:30 pm for about 30 minutes until we both return to our labs to continue working. The rest of my time at the lab consists of either continuing the electroporation part 2 procedure, checking on my plates, or creating my PowerPoint presentation for lab meetings. Around 3 pm I am pretty much done for the day and like to fill the rest of my daylight hours with an hour at the gym and a hot, less bearable walk back to Swift Apartments.