I’m going to preface this by saying that my “Day in the Life” is a bit of a mess. My day in the lab starts with a sweltering walk to the Chesterfield building in downtown Durham. For those unfamiliar, it’s the building on Main Street with the big red sign and the crown on it.
Once I go into lab, what I’m doing that day is pretty variable. The work I’m doing is primarily cell culture work, so I like to check on how my cells are growing under the microscope pretty much everyday. Depending on how long its been I’ll typically have to change the medium that my cells are growing in as well. That just about concludes the regularly occurring parts of my day. The rest of my lab work really depends on what the next steps for my project will be. I spent the first few weeks just growing my cell lines, changing their medium, and getting them ready to do tests on. Right now I’m running a cell doubling test on my cells, in the process of which I had to harvest cells, count them and more. The nature of the cell culture work I’m doing means that there has to be a lot of waiting time. It takes time for cells to grow until they’re ready to be tested or experimented on. There’s a lot of waiting.
However, while I’m waiting, I try to fill that time by learning various other procedures around the lab. I’ll oftentimes observe the other students in the lab and the different projects they’re doing in order to learn other procedures unrelated to the ones that I have to do for my project. When my PI is in the lab, I try to pop in and say hi to her since I’m directly working with her in the lab. That’s about it, my day is pretty flexible, but I really enjoy the work.
