My Life as an Intern: day 2

June 5, 2007

Yet again, ToxStart training amazes me again. It is just so fascinating to learn about environmental health because there is so much information involved! Environmental health is defined to be the welfare of people in the environment. We did so many activities that I found to be interesting today. Katy let us test our breathing and see how it feels to be a person with asthma. That was sad because I couldn't breathe at all!! Another thing I remembered was the presentation from Georg Wondrak who presented his work on skin cancer. It was pretty amazing. I had no idea that there were three different types of skin cancer! Now the most memorable part of the training. The group (consisting of Shiana, Alex and Tiffany) and Katy were discussing Hanta virus and I was so curious about knowing what caused it. Me and my big mouth now have scarred me. I discovered that it was caused by mice!! If you all didn't know, my phobia of rodents really kicked in. To put this in simpler terms, I suffered a spaz attack.

After lunch at about 1:00 pm, I walked into my lab down in the basement (AKA floor one) of the College of Pharmacy. Today was practically the most amazing day of my internship so far! I definitely experienced lab work to the max! I watched Shawn, my mentor, work on performing a Trypan Blue Exclusion Assay, which allows the bladder cells to be counted individually. Then after observing, he told me I was doing this...from scratch. I guess in these lab situations, as an intern, you are expected to do whatever it is you may not be expecting to do. I copied whatever Shawn did and was successful in doing it! In a few days, I will have to feed my cells again. That was exciting because I feel like my lab skills are definitely improving one hundred percent. Apparently my counting skills are still a bit rusty because I miscounted cells many times. That was a LAUGH OUT LOUD moment during the day.

After completing the assay, we went back down to the lab and I read research papers for about 15 minutes and then checked out at 4:45 pm. All in all, this day was entertaining, yet educational. This is the balance of fun and work that I am looking forward to everyday. Definitely, with each and every day, my skills in the lab are improving exceptionally and my best has yet to come.

Later everyone-

~A. Vo
(To be continued...)