For my senior project I am working in a biomedical engineering lab at the Lerner Research Institute in the Cleveland Clinic doing a project on the growth kinetics of stem cells. Saving the arduous details for future blog posts, my project basically entails culturing cells and observing their growth rates under certain conditions.
The first day at the lab is always slow in comparison to the rest; a day of rest for the journey that lies ahead. However, I still think the day was interesting enough to blog about in comparison to the more structured schedule that I will end up following. For the lab I am working at, I am actually a returning member having worked there during the previous summer and enjoyed the environment which is primarily what this blog post will be centered around. In addition to presenting the environment, I hope to contextualize it for others who might follow this career line and how it would relate to you. While there were still many familiar faces, some of the people I had previously worked with were either gone temporarily or had moved on in their professional careers. The people who were left had their positions filled in and in addition, the lab had decided to take in another graduating senior on project who planned to work in the summer.
I think a lab environment is one of the key factors in how interesting a lab is in providing not only a positive environment for coworkers but also being conducive to actual productivity and motivation. Various horror stories aside in regards to certain labs, the specific lab I'm working for has one of the nicest principle investigators (shortened as "PI" from now on) who actually cares for everyone in the lab and helps to promote a positive working environment. In addition, I have coworkers who are easygoing and social. To put this into context, based observations and personal experience, oftentimes high school students in a lab setting will work closely with only a few members of the lab and by extension, "lone wolf" many aspects of being a lab. For me the difference in the social aspect of the lab prompted me to make the return trip simply because science becomes much more engaging when everyone in the lab collaborates as a unit. Even if not all projects coincide, going out to lunch with colleagues reduces the stress of working.
In terms of actual work for today, I spent most of my day observing various projects that other people were working on and going over the procedure and preparation for my own project which will take its first steps tomorrow. As my project goes on, I aim to blog about the scientific process in regards to my project and throw in some specific details as appropriate.
In regards to blogging, I'd like some feedback in various areas. I feel that in blogging I often diverge from the personal nature of blogging and move to almost a paper like structure which seems very off putting on review. So I'd like to know whether or not it would be less awkward to take this from an informal angle. In addition length is a fairly big issue for me as I tend to ramble on certain subjects but I don't feel a strict 200 word blog lends itself as a good medium to my tastes. With regard to length, would it be more productive to break it into several blog posts or is the current method of paragraph breaks sufficient? Alternatively I can label various sections and hope that one of them is interesting and let the reader break down the posts like that.
Outside of specific blogging style such as quirks, in regards to content, I recognize that working in a lab isn't something that naturally appeals to many people and seems to be more of a chore. Is there anything topic in particular regarding a lab that would be interesting? Also should I be focusing my blogging efforts on the continuity of a single idea or should they just be snippets of my days?
Not all the above questions need to be answered but I'd just like some amount of feedback on those ideas so that I can hopefully write something interesting instead of an info dump.
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