Alex Baum- Cohen Lab- CHOP- Weeks 4 and 5

Hi everyone! It's Alex and I'm going to tell you you about my fourth and fifth week at the Cohen Lab!!! Originally I was going to break up weeks four and five into two different blog posts but it turns out that my research is repetitive so I did not have much to say about week four. Alas, week four and five will be combined in this awesome combined post! Basically, week four was almost exactly like week three. Actually it was exactly the same thing. Each maze trial lasts 10 days, not including the weekends, so during weeks three and four I was running the T-maze without any delay. (There are 5 days in a work week.) The difference between weeks 3 and four was that week four I finished the T-maze a lot faster than I finished the T-maze during week three. Everyday I would finish my work before twelve and not have anything to do for the rest of the day. I wanted to ask my graduate student or PI for more work to do because I wanted to learn the most I could from my lab experience. By the end of the week I was finishing the maze between 11-12. Also, I am slightly removed from the rest of my lab because they all work in a different building than me so it was difficult to get a good idea of what everyone else was doing/ what the lab researches on a larger scale. I learned a lot my first two weeks in the lab because I was in the building with everyone else everyday. I do like running the T-maze though because I like being able to work with animals in a medical facility but I was hoping to become more involved in the research in the other building as well. On Friday of that week I went down the the main building to ask him if there were any other other projects I could take on if there was anything else I could do to help out in the lab but he was on vacation the entire week and I did not know! (I did not know because my research is not in that building so no one told me.) I emailed him asking him the same thing and replied telling me that we could talk about it on Monday when he came back to the lab. Over the weekend between weeks 4 and 5 I came to the lab on the weekend to feed the mice! My dad drove me to the lab over the weekend because it is only a 25 minute drive from my town to Philly on the weekends. When I came to the lab on Saturday, I discovered that someone had already fed the mice. I went on Sunday to feed them too and on Sunday no one fed them before I got there. Week 5 was similar to week 4 except that a 30 second delay was added to each trial. At first I thought that this would make the T-maze take more time and I was excited because I wanted my work to last longer but it only prolongs my work by 30-45 minutes everyday. On Wednesday I got my second project! I will be looking and photoshopping microscope pictures of injured and non-injured brain cells for Colin, the grad student. Colin told me that he is not expecting any of the pictures to show anything interesting but he wants me to photoshop them and look at them to see if any of them could be interesting. I am honestly just excited to be in the main lab,  learn more about everyone's research, and interact with the other people in my lab! Thank you so much Dr. Peretz for taking all of us out to lunch on Tuesday!