Hi there, I'm Winston and this is my EXP Summer Lab Research Experience thus far:
So my first "week", due to scheduling issues with my PI (Principal Investigator), consisted of only the last two days of the week. I first arrived at my lab on Thursday, 6/13. We first went over some very basic things such as where I'll be working for the next few weeks, what I'll be doing, and who all the different lab members are (there are 4 or 5 of us in total so it's a very small lab). We did not have that much time to talk, however, since my PI was invited to a lecture in downtown Manhattan that was approximately 40 minutes away. I can now confidently say that my first day at my lab was an unconventional one since my PI then invited me to tag along to a lecture he knew that I would not be able to fully understand. In fact, I understood almost nothing about the lecture, which was on photoacoustics and interferometrics. I Googled these two terms after I got home in order to try and obtain a better grasp, but this barely helped whatsoever. Despite how confusing and slightly frustrating the lecture was, the day was not a total waste. I received a short, quick tour of the lab that the lecture was held at from my PI and we talked about certain types of machinery there that I too might use in the near future. Fortunately, I also got to go out to a really nice lunch with my PI, other members of that lab, and the Austrian scientist who gave the lecture. At first, I was a little nervous about making conversation with these people whose minds and education far surpassed my own. But after a while, I realized the highly confusing work talk that I couldn't make sense of was sparring and rather ephemeral. Between the 9 people at the table, there was always at least one topic of conversation that I could relate to or participate in. Since these 9 people made up a very ethnically diverse group, we actually ended up talking quite a bit about the World Cup and international sports as a whole. After lunch, we returned to the lab and my PI discussed a few other things with the lab members there. We then returned to uptown Manhattan where my long, unconventional, and surprisingly tiring first day ended.
Although I arrived at the lab completely soaked from the pouring rain, my second day was a little more geared towards what I expected lab research to be like. My PI and another doctor in the lab taught me a procedure to analyze OCT slit scans (a form of corneal topography) using a simple program called ImageJ on the computer. Each OCT slit scan is taken at a different camera angle with a total of 8 angles per eye. And for each OCT slit scan, I had to make eight corneal profile plots, essentially a small graph and chart. So for each patient, I have to make 128 of these plots, making the analysis of OCT slit scans to be a very repetitive and borderline boring procedure. Luckily, I also got to observe my PI work with in vivo rabbit eyes and take ultrasound pachymetry scans of 4 of them. Don't worry, the rabbits were anesthetized so they experienced very little discomfort. The reason he scanned these rabbits was two-fold. He needed to measure corneal curvature for the doctor who brought the rabbits. Meanwhile, he also needed to measure the thickness (pachymetry) of the cornea for his own purposes. It was interesting to see the almost symbiotic work relationship between the two labs and between the two doctors.
Week 1 was overall a good start to my time here at my lab. I'm pretty excited to see what else my summer research time has in hold for me.
Good night and good luck,
Winston Kung
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