It’s hard to believe that I have already spent 6 weeks working in Professor Williams’ lab – we only have 2 more weeks to go, and I am nowhere near done. Despite the relatively short period of time that I spent researching here in this lab, the experience has been undeniably invaluable, and the ideas that I’m exploring in this lab are truly interesting to me. How does aerobic, voluntary exercise improve one’s memory and increase hippocampal neurogenesis? The link between “exercise” and “memory” is just so seemingly unrelated, yet surprisingly very much complementary according to many prior research. And of course, with this finding we can apply the knowledge to clinical settings to help maintain/improve memory in patients suffering from brain therapy or injuries.
It’s great that I can actually explore these ideas in the lab, but sadly woes also coexist with the excitement of new discoveries. When you put your research findings all together nicely on a 10 page paper, readers can (and mostly do) focus on the “interesting” conclusions drawn from your project and not have to worry about the petty little details that go into the experiment. But as part of the team who’s actually doing the work, I realized that the work put in to produce that nice 10 page paper was a bit more cumbersome and involved a lot of details and manual labor than I had expected. Right now, I’m the person who mostly works with the mice – putting them in and out of the running cages and running probe tests – and mice aren’t as sweet and pretty as those that appear in the Disney movies. Some mice love me, gently sniffing and stroking my hand with their tiny little front feet when I put my gloved hands into their cages. Some mice despise me with passion, running away as soon as I open their cages, and hide their tails so I wouldn’t be able to grab them when the time came for me to move them out to a different location; sometimes they would kick their beddings at me to forewarn their needle-like bites if I dared another move of my finger.
There are other details that are involved with the research that give me not-so-fun time, but just like Dr. Willard said during his talk, we don’t want to focus on the little details and the techniques; looking at the bigger picture of this project and thinking about the question that will get answered through those little details, it’s definitely worth the pain. I don’t have all the results yet to say that my project is a success or not, but from what I have so far it looks like our hypothesis is pointing towards the right direction. May the odds be ever in your favor!
