Ally, Entry #1, The first week

It might have taken a month, but I finally started in my lab a week ago.  Not too many people there.  Usually I see my PI, Olaf (insert snowman joke here), around once a day.  There's an undergrad named Stephanie who works there, a grad student named Mario who comes in every once in a while (he starts working more often at the end of July), and the lab manager Jennifer who I've seen once (she just had a baby and is working part time, not stationed on campus).  I work closely with a funny little German woman named Carola.  Since I'm a minor, the university won't let me work in the lab alone, so I work with Carola.  We quickly bonded over the "Ready for Hillary" sticker on my laptop, although my true heart goes out to Bernie Sanders (guess who can vote in the primaries).

For most of the first week, Carola and I worked with fish and insect samples collected from Olaf's trip to Mongolia.  The samples are being prepared to have their C and N stable isotope levels analyzed.  The samples are homogenized, then around 1mg of the sample is carefully placed into this tiny tin capsule shaped like one of the cups from the dining hall.  Room for error is allowed,  you can fill the capsule with anywhere between .8 and 1.2 mg of the sample, measured with a microbalance.  The tin capsule is then shut with a pair of forceps and crushed into a tiny little ball and put into a cell in a tray, every detail meticulously recorded and to be typed into a computer later by me.  It's mind numbing work.  Carola crushes the samples, and I practice my fine motor stills on the capsules.

Between every sample, we have to clean everything down,  If I've learned anything, it's that any credible lab is built on kimwipes, ethanol, and tin foil.  Tin foil everywhere.  And the labs are a mess.  I had this clean cut sparkling white image of a lab in my head, and that's not exactly the reality of the situation.

Currently, Olaf is in the midst of building his own lab space on campus.  He has a lab down in Tuckerton (I think that's how you spell it?  I could just look it up but nah), but after Sandy a lot of that space is unusable.  He's been on campus for 5 years and still hadn't been given lab space.  That's insane.  He walked through what's going to be his lab and was so excited to see the freezer and oven, it was like watching a kid in a candy shop.

I started training for preparing fatty acid (FA) samples.  It's a long, tedious process which I can't really participate in since I'm not allowed to use a lot of the chemicals involved (choloform which I get, toluene which I don't get because it's everywhere, and methanol which I really don't get because it's basically rubbing alcohol), me being a minor and all, but I'm learning a lot about the chemistry of the process.  And here I was thinking I could leave chem in freshman year and forget about it until college again.

The whole deal with the FA and stable isotopes is to see what levels of each respectively are found in prey and predators.  When we see what levels in what concentrations of FA and SI are in the organism, we can see what it's been eating and construct a food web, in very simple terms.

I have to wear pants in the lab.  It is so hot outside and I wear pants.  I end up wearing a lot of black and dark colors because that's all I own, which doesn't help.

Lastly, here is me ft. Carola working on some stable isotopes.