19 Jul Kaila Rebolledo Unda – George Lab – week 6

Hello, everybody, my name is Kaila, and this is my last week at UCSD in the George lab.  Before I get started, I would like to thank everyone who made this possible back at Pinhead and Telluride, and a huge thank you to everyone in the George lab for making this experience so amazing and so hard to leave. 

MONDAY 07•13•26

This week I was determined and set myself a realistic goal of how much work I wanted to finish before I left. All morning I spent struggling with the coronal view, and I got really frustrated. When another grad student took over the computer to work on something, I worked on my slideshow presentation, and on it was a page full of things I learned, and the very first thing was patience. 

I remembered how much I struggled that first week when I was first introduced to the program. I had no idea how the brain worked and how the program worked, but this time I was more familiar with the brain and all the tilts it required. 

After lunch, I worked on my presentation and got all the complicated science stuff down. 

TUESDAY 07•14•26

Today started off just a bit rough as I thought I saved a brain, but I didn’t, and he was quite pretty. But today was a great day for something else. 

When we discovered coronal view, one of the features we didn’t discover was that we could stretch the brain out to make it fatter. Here comes the story of my nemesis. 

DF3 was the first brain I ever tried to do, and I struggled for the first two days on him before I gave up and moved on. When I finished all the dose-response brains, I went back to edit all of them, and I still struggled with him, so I determined that he was deformed to the point that he was fat. So I moved on. When this new feature was discovered, I had to go back to my first list of brains, and in there was DF3. Immediately I went to the coronal view, and there it was. I was right. He was fat, so I stretched him out and messed around a bit to line him up. We ran a program that would make sure all the edges were lined up. I got a message at 10:10 pm from my mentor… ‘DF3 is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life’.  I was about to start crying tears of joy. All the hours of struggling for this moment.  

WEDNESDAY 07•15•26 

I walked into Skaggs super excited to see DF3, and so was Selene. We sat down, opened it up, and… he was perfect. Beyond perfect. We both looked like we were about to start crying tears of joy. We decided that that day we would celebrate with Jamba Juice. 

After that, we knew perfection was a possibility, and I went back to coronal view to try and replicate it. It was a bit hard, and I had some that were almost perfect. The day went on, and I met someone else from the lab. She was super fun and was doing some drawings for Selene of mice smoking nicotine and in all the stages she tested. 

When we came back from the Jamba Juice celebration, that other lab person had some goodies. There was this huge rat stuffed animal and a bunch of other little fat ones. They were adorable and sat on top of the computer and just brightened up my mood that whole day. 

THURSDAY 07•16•26

Today’s morning started on a high note. Every morning Stella and I have been going to Planet Fitness, and every morning it’s the same worker greats us. So we went up to him and asked if tomorrow, on our last day, we could use the spa and massage chairs, and he said yes. So we had that to look forward to. 

At the lab we pulled up DF3 again and we mapped out the 3D view of the brain and he was even more perfect than I thought. I continued working and got through a lot of brains; they were not as amazing as I would’ve hoped, but if we run one of the programs for long enough, my lining up should be good enough to pass. 

Towards the end of the day, we went on a little adventure. One of my mentor’s students, Skylar, goes to work at an ice cream shop every day after being at the lab, so we decided to go on a side quest to the shop she works at. When we got there, she looked super happy to see us and gave us some recommendations. I got a banana pudding one, and it was super good. We blazed the Hamilton playlist there and back, and overall it was an amazing side quest. 

FRIDAY 07•17•26

Last day. We went to the gym, and the worker led us to massage chairs, and it was like the most amazing 15 minutes of my life. I was all woken up and all hyped. When I got to the lab, I went over my presentation with Selene to make sure it was all good because we have to perform it in front of Oliver George and other lab members and a different lab. 

It was a bit stressful, but I did it, and I finally got to introduce myself to him. After the presentations, we went back to the computer, and I started speed-running a bunch of them, hoping to get as many done as possible. And I got a lot done, honestly. I ended on a good note with a near-perfect brain (not as good as DF3, but he was pretty). Then Selene handed me something to keep. It was a little squishy brain and a ruler. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but since the beginning we had been using that ruler and brain to map out and see visually how we cut the brain and how we think the rotations look. It almost had me cry. 

Stella’s mum got here, and we showed her the lab, and we started walking to Jamba Juice and the bookstore to get some UCSD merch, but they were BOTH closed. Kinda unfortunate, but we ended up getting boba with Selene for the last time. 

When we got home, Stella made some baller salmon rice bowls, and they were so good. As a big group, we all went to the beach and took some really cute pictures. 

SATURDAY 07•18•26

We started driving, and we got sent off with a little performance of ‘So Long, Farewell’ from The Sound of Music that all the girls put together for us. 

This internship has been such an amazing experience, and I’m so sad to leave it. I’ve had so much fun with everyone here. Thank you to all