Anyways, today was my last day working in the Wade lab. I started working here in the spring semester of my freshman year of undergrad (February 2012) right after sending an (probably very awkward) email to Dr. Juli Wade. Juli works on the neurobiology of zebra finches and anole lizards, and stumbling upon this as a wee little freshman I thought it sounded pretty cool. At that time I just wanted to get some time in a lab to see what research was like, because I was still deciding between going the veterinary or academic route.
But I really couldn't have picked a better place (I'm working on anoles now too!). As I was there more and more it sold me on pursuing a career doing research, and I fell in love with the lab environment. I found that the research interests I began to develop aligned pretty well with those of the Wade lab, which I never would have guessed when I started three years before.
Working here I started out just doing simple grunt work, as any newb should expect, helping care for the birds, cleaning dishes, autoclaving when necessary, etc. This was still extremely exciting, especially for me, coming from a background where I knew nothing about research. As I stuck with the lab I learned to do more and more. I became an integral part of the team, managing our large colony of zebra finches, training new students, helping with PCR and other molecular techniques, sectioning and staining tissue, and more. Over the last year I was there I was in charge of a project recording male birds at different ages across development to see how their song changes after surgical manipulation. This project was a lot of work but also a lot of fun and I might even get an authorship from it. Aside from the techniques I learned so much about what it was like to be a graduate student, and when it came time to choose a graduate school for myself I was offered so much great advice by the students, post-docs, and professors I had worked so closely with. As I left the lab today, I left behind great friends (Shout out to Linda Qi-Beach, Halie Kerver, Jenn Lampen, Briana Brady, Yu Ping Tang, Camilla Peabody, and Juli Wade!) and a great experience, knowing I had made a lasting mark in my time there... and it may have fell apart a week later!
This experience was great for so many reasons. I started working there so early on and I was extremely lucky that the research going on in the lab ended up aligning pretty well with my interests later on. I got so much experience working in the lab that by the time I was done there I could do many techniques as well as or better than many of the graduate students. It was also great because the lab was small and intimate. I got to know everyone very well and they were very open to teaching me new things. I feel this type of one on one attention can be lost in some types of research environments. In turn I also put in the necessary time to learn and do what I was being taught very well. I can't say this type of experience would work for everyone, but I found it an extremely influential part of my experience leading up to graduate school.
So that was a lot more than expected, which I guess makes sense when I am trying to write about the last four years of my life. Here is a lizard tax for good measure:
