It’s been quite a semester, both inside and outside the lab. For starters, I am finally working directly with Prof. Belinda Pastrana. Before then, I was working directly with one of her research lab technicians. Nonetheless, because I was working mostly in the area of protein expression and purification, I felt like my interests were more geared towards biophysical research studies, and thought: ” Who better to work with than the woman who knows biophysics best?” And so now our arguments concern spectra analyses of all sorts, a lot of planning, calculations…the usual science talk; it’s great!
I have to say I’ve managed to learn more than I expected this term. I, for one, feel like I can sit down and think critically about things, and even when certain approaches I take are not fully supported by convincing, explicit arguments or data, it always manages to work through right at the very last end…its all a matter of knowing why you approach things a certain way, even when they might not make that much sense at that very momment. I can sit down and read a research paper from cover to cover, and actually develop a full interest in it as I read through the lines. Even if the research isn’t directly concerned with my current research interests. Research overall always seems to have a purpose, and allowing yourself to appreciate the science that’s being worked on all around you is something I used to take very much for granted. Plus, I can’t help but enjoy questioning my mentor about things when we have different oppinions over a certain subject. It helps in reminding me that I’m not alone in this; that we are two different minds working on the exact same thing. We must be up to something big!
I think my biggest challenge overall this term was to move from that “learning phase” we all go through everytime we’re welcomed to a lab for the first time, and finally feel like I’m one of the big boys. Prof. Pastrana likes making sure students are there for their love of research, not just class credits and recommendation letters; I finally got around to convincing her. No one would spend (sometimes close to 20-24) hours a week in a lab for nothing. Ok, so I don’t spend peak hours at night in the lab anymore but lets be realistic, very few people at the undergraduate college level are that commited to research.
I hope this next term can be much more busy. I see many drastic changes currently taking place at the lab, which makes things much more fun and interesting to look forward to. Hopefully we’ll get a paper out soon on a protein complex Pastrana has been working on with us students. For the time being, I will finish up (hopefully) with my CD spectrana analysis for this term, and will focus on other aspects of research currently taking place at the lab as we speak. I will be working under the guidance of Doctor Walter Chazin from the structural biology department at Vanderbilt this summer. I’ve heard he’s an amazing mentor, has many facilities in his lab, ranging from mass spec to NMR (and he was the student of a Nobel prize 
). More on my summer research soon to come. This will be a summer!
