Geek Camp Days 1 & 2

For those of you who don't know, I am at Smith College in Massachusetts, taking a two week intensive course in cell biology. It was set up by a company called New England Biological. Trust me if I hadn't gotten a scholarship, I wouldn't be here because it is wicked expensive.

I was super excited about the course up until the day I actually had to go to it. At that point, all of the doubts kicked in. How am I ever going to measure up to everyone else? Who's going to be in the courses??? My gosh, i'm just a self taught science teacher, who are they going to be?

This is my dorm Chase House. Smith college is a very old institution. It was started in the eighteen seventies and has served women as undergraduates ever since. The campus is a lovely mix of modern and antiquated brick buildings. Even my room isn't too bad!!

Okay, the lighting's not great, but other than that, nothing to complain about. I sat down on the bed and started reading the welcome manual and lesrning about the people that I would be taking classes with. I'm not gonna lie, I was heartily intimidated. There are Stanford professors, Harvard postdocs, two women who just finished there veterinary oncology, residency and a ton of lab directors and one fascinating experimental physicist. It really is amazing to be around so many smart and accomplished women. The woman whose work I find the most inspiring comes from Peru. She is working on early skin cancer detection. She also has a detailed past in infectious disease prevention. You can imagine that I had about a thousand questions to ask. Amazingly, one of the other women at my table actually had Dengue! I have never met anyone who was so unfortunate. She gave me a much better understanding of the progression of the disease, which I will certainly take back to my students. Even though my we uh ate dinner at six o'clock, we still did lecture and lab work on day 1. Unfortunately, I don't have video footage of me doing the experiment, but here is the begining of experiment #2, Genome Analysis, that we did. You can read about the experiments at the end of my post.

Yesterday looked like a walk in the park compared to today. Up at six thirty not in bed until nine thirty. Okay, I know 9:30. Isn't all that late for most of you, but after a full day of lecture and lab I am beat. Upside I'm still not lost yet.

I got to purify the DNA that I worked with yesterday. It's not that I'd never done it before, but I had never done it in this complex a process. If you're interested, you can see my video of the beginning of this experiment, and remember you can read more in experiment #2 at the end of the blog.

And of course, because I'm super proud of it, here is the DNA that my lab partner and I have extracted. It's all in a ball right now, and is going to take seven days to go back into solution. You'll have to wait a while for the end of this experiment.

I'm going to cut this blog a little short, because I need to get a better understanding of exactly how PCR machines work. We're going to be using one pretty much every day and I get the feeling I'll get a lot more out of the labs if I really nail this. Being here makes me realize how many gaps I had in my understanding. Not big things, just little things that make the big picture clearer. I'll share more with you about my lab partner as I learn more about her. She's really an amazing mentor and is helping me gain so many skills.

Here's a list of all of the labs that I'm going to work on over the next two weeks. Wish me luck.