Finishing my last week at the George Lab has been both exciting and melancholy. I am excited to get back to Colorado and see friends and family again, but I will also definitely miss my fellow lab members and San Diego. I have learned a lot about how behavioral research with animals works, and more importantly the different roles that can be played in the process. I do not think I have quite enough drive or capability to be a PhD student in the field, but I do think I could see myself as a lab technician. I would not necessarily want to be a technician in the neuroscience/addiction field though. There are lots of different directions I could try to go and many different levels of education while still being in some kind of science field. This internship has been amazing and I have learned a lot, but it has made me a little bit less sure that I want to go into science than I was before. That is something I am very thankful of because it may be what saves me from spending several years going to college for it. I do think that science is still my most likely option though.
This last week was spent doing slightly less gross of work than much of the time I’ve been here. Instead of cleaning alcohol self administration cages, labeling rats tails, and put rats into self administration chambers, I spent most of the week freezing organs (Imaged bellow). This is a process that is not used for our own research, but rather for that of others. There are very few facilities that can run as many rats as ours and get as many addicted. As a result of this we tend to end up with a surplus of wasted bodies at the end of each experiment. Instead of simply throwing away organs they are removed from the animals right after their deaths. This is not something that I participated in, but I watched as a few post docs did. I did however get to be personally involved in the freezing process of these organs that occurs just before they are sent out to curious labs around the world. This was something that involved lots of dry ice, and a lot of straining organs from jars full of formaldehyde. It was a good change of pace from animal handling, and felt pretty good because I was helping to provide important resources to labs that would do good work with them.
Earlier tonight my host mom took us out to dinner for my last night in town; I am leaving tomorrow after I am done with my last day of work at the lab. The dinner was amazing and it was a great opportunity for me to see my host mom before leaving. It was also very kind of her to pay for the dinner, and I tried halibut for the first time. I have learned a lot about how different two people’s worlds can be from living with her. She has been unbelievably generous, and it has been great staying with her. Maybe someday I will see her again, but I’m not exactly counting on it happening.
Pinhead has been a great experience for me, and I can’t wait to tell everyone at home about it. 
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