Down a few stairs of the LSRC and through the doors of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience lies the Pearson Lab. As I walk in each morning, I’m greeted by the other undergrad in the lab, Chris, my mentor Dr. Anne Draelos, and whoever else is there. To start my day, I set up my laptop with a monitor and get settled into my desk, usually with tea or coffee in hand. Anne always comes by to check in on the progress I’ve made with my project, and we discuss objectives for the day as well as general goals going forward.
The bulk of my day consists of coding, debugging, and researching. Currently, I’m working on creating plots that have live updates as new neural data comes in and also including information about the stimuli that’s present during the experiment. Tackling tasks like this requires me to explore different Python packages and experiment with different lines of code. As a coder, my best friends are Stack Overflow and Slack. Whenever I get stuck working on a piece of code, my first line of defense is to google to the problem and then look on Stack Overflow for solutions from people with similar problems. If I’m still stuck after a couple of attempts, I’ll use Slack to send a message to Anne. Slack is one of the main forms of communication at the Pearson Lab, aside from talking in-person. We all use Slack to send messages about meetings, questions, and other general lab information. My mentor Anne works between two labs, so at least once a day I hear “If anything comes up, send me a message on Slack,” and her response comes minutes and usually seconds later.
As for general day to day life in the lab, many other people trickle in throughout the day. There can be as many as 10 or 15 people there on a given day. My desk is in the side room, along with Chris, Liz (another one of my mentors on the improv team), and Trevor. The PI, Dr. John Pearson, comes down from his office around once a day and checks in on everyone. We have lab meetings on Mondays, a meeting with the improv team on Thursdays, and a meeting to merge code branches on GitHub on Fridays. I really enjoy the comradery of the lab and the research work I’m doing makes me feel like a real computer scientist!
