WhittersCO

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Job

I have been doing an independent study this semester with a lab on campus. It is supposed to cover human disease, and I should really read those books I bought, however it has turned out to be more research focused. Basically, I needed someone to oversee me for the human disease class, and Dr. DeSouza said he'd sign for it. So I have been the lab bitch for the last couple months. All the bitch work has paid off though, and I will soon be getting PAID for the bitch work. Doc asked me yesterday if I wanted a job for the summer and the answer was yes.
My employment plan for the next year or so is as follows. Be the bitch in the lab for the summer and then get a job with the school district working with the disabled kids. Either as an assistant to the Occupational Therapists, or as a para like I was before.
The run down about the lab.....
We research how exercise and vitamin C help out the vascular endothelium (the cell layer between the blood and smooth muscle in your veins and arteries). So what usually happens is we draw blood, make the subjects do a stress test, infuse some drugs in their arm, have them either exercise or give them some vitamins and do the whole thing all over again. Check it out at http://www.colorado.edu/kines/research/vascular.html
My responsibilities: I can do the stress test stuff without any help and I am just getting trained on all of the blood work. After we get the blood, we spin it around and add chemicals to it to see all sorts of cool stuff. We have a really expensive microscope that lets us see the specific cells that we study. It's all interesting and a bit intimidating since I haven't had very much practice yet. Although, I am learning quickly because everyone is really good about making me jump in and get my hands dirty (actually, we wear gloves).
Bed time now... it's been a long day.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home