Ry Gould Week Three

This week I continued work on the same animal behavior research I had been doing. I did not get a chance to head to the molecular biology department to help with that side of things, but I was fine with this because it is a little bit more exciting to be working with the rats.

This week one of the post docs in my lab tasked all four of the interns with creating a presentation on a paper having to do with the type of research done in this lab. In the past she has had us read papers written about our specific lab about specific experiments that our lab has done, but the papers she wanted us to present on came from other labs. Two interns were tasked with presenting on a behavioral research experiment  paper, a paper that is mostly just an overview of a specific experiment and what the data has shown. Wynton and myself were tasked with presenting on a longer and slightly less straightforward paper that was a review of a neuropeptide called nociceptin. Even though we presented on the same paper we each had to make separate presentations. Fortunately, we had extra time to put our presentations together than the other interns because of our longer paper. The point of a review on a single neuropeptide, such as the one we read, is that it can give information discovered from dozens of research experiments. Instead of having to read a paper on each neurological system it may have a role in, we could simply read one continuous paper to get an idea of all the information needed in a much shorter time. Presenting went pretty smoothly and I learned a lot about neurology both creating the presentation, and when having it criticized/corrected as I presented it to the postdoc.

This week outside of the lab I was able to escape some of the higher temperatures that have been rolling in for July by going to the beach. The beach closest to our host families house is never very crowded, and even though there are days where the waves aren’t so good there are far more days where they are great. It is incredibly beautiful there because it is right under some massive sand stone cliffs. There is also a launchpad for gliders a little bit above the beach, so most sunny days you can see people flying around all day.

I ate at the best restaurant I have been to sense I have been in San Diego on Monday night. It was a delicious seafood restaurant right on La Jolla Cove called the Crab Catcher. I tried crab for the first time in my life and was not disappointed. I was also able to taste lobster for the second time in my life, and I cannot decide which of the two tastes better. It was a great experience even though it was not the cheapest of food.

Before coming out here I thought it would feel like a really long trip, but these first three weeks have passed extremely quickly. I am now halfway done so I am definitely going to make sure that I cherish the second half as much as is possible. Hopefully I’ll have a little bit more to write about in terms of what I did outside of the lab next week, but that is not to say that I have not been having a great time.