05 Jul Anna Countryman | BNI | Week Four

Coding, coding, and coding some more

Hey Readers! I can’t believe I’m already only a week from being back in Colorado. The past month has gone by so insanely fast, but you know what they say: time flies when you’re having fun. At the lab meeting this week, I noticed something really cool. The whole conference room was full of women, including myself. It was actually so inspiring to see so many women in STEM, where many people view it as a male dominated field. Anyway, I just thought I’d touch on that observation. I also spoke with one of the research engineers here and he helped me to understand how large of a variety there is under biomedical and biochemical engineering. It was nice to hear his perspective on it, that curiosity and hard work are the most necessary qualities to go into a field like this. This week, we had 2 seminars. The first was on Neuropsychology, the study of how brain conditions affect behavior and cognition. The speaker, Dr. Eagan, made note of her path to where she is today, what she works with on a daily basis, and struggles in the industry. I recognized a lot of her terminology from the AP Psychology class I took last school year.  The second was on proteomics, which studies proteins and their function. The speaker connected the ideas of general protein study to cancer and neurodegenerative disease treatment and prevention. Per usual, it’s something I didn’t know much about or that there were careers focused on it, so it’s cool to hear. Barrow is really opening my eyes to the sheer number and variety of career choices in the general field of neuroscience and biotechnology. It’s something I’ll be thinking a lot about going into college applications and choosing a major.

Sunset on Friday

As I shared in my last blog, I had left FreeSurfer to run through 30 different subjects from Wednesday to Sunday, hoping it would continue working in my out-of-office days last weekend. While it did, when I came back on Monday, only 20 of 30 had completed, so it was taking a little longer than anticipated to retrieve data. Until it finished, I went through, trying to sort the pages of information that’s collected as efficiently as possible. I went through all 36 subjects, adding different aspects of brain volume – including total cerebral white matter, total cortical brain matter, and hippocampal – into my spreadsheet containing the behavioral data. The timeline was weighing on me a bit during this process because I was running out of time to complete my poster, which can’t happen until I finish my data analysis. With that, I stayed late Wednesday and extracted all of the necessary volumetric data with the help of Hannah, the Grad student who’s been teaching and helping me with all my coding and working on my poster. After working with Hannah some more, I went through some data analysis on R, which I’d spent a lot of time learning in weeks 1 and 2. It was great to be able to apply that work. On R, I was able to create charts and graphs to display correlational data and find significance. Making the charts and actually coding the information on my own for the first time was extremely satisfying. I immediately felt a surge of relief and accomplishment. With that, my data collection was complete, and I set off to finish my Symposium Poster! I worked with my mentor to make sure all the details were accurate, and the necessary information was present. Thursday, I worked later than most of the employees, knowing I had to finish my data analysis before I left. Friday the 3rd of July is considered an observed holiday, so my lab wasn’t in the office. I worked from home that day, finishing my research poster and applying any edits my mentor recommended. 

Firework show!!

On my day off Friday, I went with my host family to see a morning movie at the movie theatre because they have a 2-dollar ticket deal in the mornings. That evening, I found a different volleyball open gym and went to that. There weren’t many people there so we each got a lot of specific feedback and attention from the coaches.  Then, of course, Saturday was the 4th of July. I made a latte at home, to avoid spending 8 dollars on a coffee, and it turned out great! I went out to an early dinner at a sushi restaurant with my host family, surprising them by paying the bill as part of a thank you for letting me stay with them. We then picked up some McDonald’s soft serve ice cream and went back to the house, since there were still 3 hours until the fireworks. We watched the Lego movie, and I played some Mario Bros with my host sister. At 9, we drove over to my host mom’s office building where we watched the fireworks from the 23rd floor; the show lasted almost 30 minutes with multiple fireworks constantly exploding.  Sidenote: the sunsets were beautiful this week. Come back for my last blog next week!