Arnob Entry #3 - A day in the life

I will start out this blog-post by talking about what my life is like outside of the lab this summer. My lab is in the Columbia Medical Center in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan (around 168th street). Most tourists visiting New York will probably not even think about coming to this portion of the city, for all the famous attractions (Times Square, World Trade Center, Financial District, etc.) are in the southern half of the island. I live in 92th street, which is in the Upper West Side district. I was lucky to find a room to live in here for a reasonable rent (my lab is only a 20 minute subway ride away). This elderly lady is letting me rent out one of the rooms in her apartment for the eight weeks I will be researching at the lab. There is no air conditioning, but the many fans in my room keep the temperature nice and cool.

I find that there is not as much structure in one day at the lab in comparison to, for example, a day at school. The only set-in-stone events that happen at the lab are our bi-weekly meetings which usually don't last more than an hour. Other than that, the lab members (most which are post-docs) come and go as they please, and this mentality has been pushed onto me. Of course, I am still there from morning to late afternoon everyday because I need to get my work done. But if I sleep in one day, there is not much to worry about, for if I get there an hour late I can just stay one hour later to get everything done. I usually get to the lab from around 9:30-10:00 everyday. One day, all the lab members may be here when I arrive but another day I may be the first one. But that's okay because I have a key to the lab. 

When I get back to my apartment at around 4:00-5:00, I usually take like an hour long nap first. And then once it gets dark, I enjoy the New York nightlife until dawn. No, not really. But there is much to do in the city, whether it is eating lots of various foods that are obtainable within walking distance or going on a long but scenic run in central park. July 4th weekend was especially nice because my family came to visit me and we saw some ginormous fireworks on the East River. Millions of people gathered and almost the entire east coast of the island was blocked off to vehicles. After the fireworks ended, it took a half hour to walk two blocks because of the masses.

I will end this blog-post with a slight summary of what has been going on inside the lab this past week. This week (four weeks in) I started to run sessions for my experiment because I have learned all the code and analysis techniques to successfully run my experiment and interpret the data. My graduate student was on vacation this week so it was initially hard to get the experiment up and running, but then I realized I could ask anyone in my lab for help and they would gladly give it. Thank you for reading EXP community.