Zachary Larson, Borlaug Summer Intern, is on location at Nanjing Agricultural University and providing us with updates this summer of his trip. Here’s his latest. You can also find a photo album he’s got started here: Borlaug Summer Intern Photo Album. The internship is being sponsored by the Iowa State University Plant Sciences Institute.
I would have to say that the last week has been one of the best I have had here in China, and it has made me fall in love with Nanjing, doing lab work, and the inevitable heartbreak that will come when I will have to leave Nanjing in just a week.
Beyond an ordinary week, I have had the chance to meet my best friend , see the craziness of the Nanjing train station, and get a better handle on my lab work as I finally get past some of the initial errors.
As far as my recent lab work, I have been doing rather well. While I am still very inexperienced, I have finally gotten a handle on solely running PCR, gel, and DNA extraction experiments without too much contamination or lab error. To be honest, I know that my lab work has offered no useful data to Wang Jia, the student I have been working with. But, I realize the most important thing that I can take away from my experiences and apply to other labs is that scientific research is pretty much worthless without knowing how to do the basics of the experiment and repeat the experiment without a large margin of error or difference.
I realized this the hard way because in the my initial view, I thought that understanding the complexities of the PCR process or the overlying goal of Wang Jia’s research was the most important. But, in hindsight, the most important thing to focus on when going into a new research setting is to learn the experiments, the tools of the trade, well and only then should I worry about how my results having a research impact. This will be a valuable experience to learn from, and I am glad that I have been able to have such a humbling experience this early, and, hopefully, in the future I will be more prepared to start work in research better.
Continuing as much research and preforming enough experiments in the time I have left has taken up most of my time, but I have had the extreme luck to meet one of my friend Hu Ling 胡玲 who recently graduated and came to Nanjing last Saturday to start work. While I haven’t had such an odd experience as meeting a friend for the first time who practically knows me as a sibling, it turned out to be an extraordinary experience, and I will hopefully be able to see her and several other close friends before I leave Nanjing.
As the time draws closer to finally being able to leave Nanjing, I still have several more things to look forward too (beyond the goodbyes of course). Today I will have the chance to meet another friend Yuan Ting 袁婷 who is visiting Nanjing from Jiangxi province, Saturday I will have a chance to give a presentation of what I have learned here in China and also show a little bit of my life in the U.S, and lastly I hope to hang out with my new friends as much as I can before I finally have to leave next Saturday. In all, this week has been incredible, and despite having to leave Nanjing in just one week, I am incredibly happy that I still have another week to enjoy my time with Professor Wang, Wang Jia, and many other friends in Nanjing.