All right. So as was said, my name is Emily Durlacher. I am a junior neuroscience major philosophy minor. And I'm going to talk to you about my time in a neurobio lab at Boston University. And also, I'd like you to excuse the pun, I really just couldn't help myself. 

[CHUCKLING] 

So a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about. First, I'm going to address how I got to be you, sort of my pathway to my internship. A little bit about my process of getting accustomed to the lab environment. The climax of this learning curve, which were the two presentations I had to give in lab meeting. And the upshot. So as a philosophy minor, the upshot in philosophy is, why does this matter, and why is it important? 

So my path to my internship was a little bit different than how you'll hear most people got theirs. I applied for and actually was accepted to an abroad program in Berlin and Munich studying lab technique in Germany for six weeks. However, upon further investigation into the program, we found that I was going to have to come up with-- from somewhere-- a very large amount of money in a very short amount of time. So after many calls home and some tears, we realized that Germany was not going to be a possibility for me. 

So the next step, I went to the CDC to Jenny Watermill-- who is not here, but who I thanked and ran into-- and I said, what's my next step? This is what I was going to do with my summer. Where do I go from here? 

And she said, well, have you tried cold emailing? You live in Greater Boston, it's the best place in the country to find university lab jobs. Have you looked up any of these labs, read some of their work, sent the PIs an email saying, here's what I do, and here's my transcript, and I'd love to work for you. And I hadn't. 

So that night, I went back to my room in Ham and I sent three cold emails. And I was fortunate enough to hear back from two labs in 24 hours, both of which were interested in hiring me. One at Brandeis University and one at BU. 

And during Spring Break, I went in and interviewed, and both labs offered me a position during the interview. So I had to choose between a further commute but maybe subject material I was more interested in at BU, and a closer commute, but maybe material I was less interested in. And I ended up going with the slightly riskier choice of BU. 

So my early days in the lab definitely took some getting used to. I was really surprised by how informally my coworkers dressed. Not that they looked sloppy or unprofessional, but in a lot of other internships, you would hear about at LEAP people have to dress very business casual. 

And what I learned is that, in a lab, it's about safety. Are you wearing long pants? Are you wearing close-toed shoes? Could you make it through a chemical spill OK? Granted, that's a whole other scenario than when you're on the T, and it's 95 degrees, and you're stuck in long pants and close-toed shoes. But that's another story. 

Something else that surprised me was just how bureaucratic I found research to be. I started at BU on June 1, and as it was, it took me three weeks to be able to enter the animal facility and handle mice. And I was only there for 12 weeks, so three weeks is a long time. 

And so what I did in the meantime was I classified tapes of mouse behavior that had been in the lab for years. Because the lab is very small. There were five people other than myself. So as research was progressing, these tapes had kind of sat, and nobody had analyzed them. So this bottom picture is one of the first things I ever did in the lab, which was over a long period of time, I coded and organized behavior over this interval of time. 

And when I came into the lab, I saw things like this, none of which I had ever seen before. It was my first time ever in a lab setting. The middle signage was-- the sign was outside of my lab, and it was telling you, this is the safety equipment you have to wear, this is who you call if you break something or spill something. So I had to get up to snuff very, very quickly on, these were the procedures, this is the signage, this is how things are run. 

On the right is our two-photon microscope, which was probably the single coolest piece of equipment in our lab. It actually shot photons of light into the brains of live subjects so we could observe neural behavior in live subjects. And on the left, just as an image of some of the-- how the chemicals were set up-- and again, at a big school, I wasn't used to just this wide array of products and applications. 

Something else is that our lab was based in the olfactory system, so the sense of smell especially as related to mouse behavior. The only problem is, I had never previously studied the olfactory system. In fact, in my Intro to Neuroscience class, my professor had her book, we were doing sensory systems, and she said, you know, olfaction is too complicated. You don't need to know it for this exam. So I come into the lab, and naturally, my coworkers are throwing around this vocabulary that I've never heard before. So it took a lot of self-learning to sort of accustomize myself to what exactly was going on in the lab. 

But about halfway through my time at BU, my supervisor approached me and said, how would you like to take on an independent project? And I was totally shocked. I said, a visiting undergrad who doesn't even attend your school, and you want to give her all this responsibility? He took a really big risk. 

And I ended up conducting trials on socially transmitted food preferences in mice, which-- to give you a short synopsis-- is basically the idea that one mouse can smell information about the mouse another mouse has-- or the food another mouse has eaten. No cannibalism here. And can then get information about the relative health of the mouse, and also the relative safety of the food. 

So the single biggest task that I took on during my time at BU was the presentations I had to give in our weekly lab meetings. These meetings were used for either presentations of primary literature, or presentation of data from your own experiments. The single scariest thing I did all summer was when my coworker came to my desk, put this on my desk, and said, this was just published in the Journal of Cell Biology this month. We want you to present this in lab meeting next week. And I looked at this, and my jaw dropped. 

I said, I have no idea what this means. I'm starting from scratch. Of course, I said I'm going to do it. I'm going to take it on. But it took me that entire week, 20, 25 hours' worth of work, of just sitting at my desk and plowing through this paper. And it was incredibly rewarding, but at the time, it felt like this work was just amounting to nothing. 

And then my last lab meeting that I was there for, I presented my own data on socially transmitted food preferences, which one of the grasses on the far right. My data actually ended up being inconclusive, which was a little bit heartbreaking after spending two months researching this. But what I realized is this is an ongoing project. At my lab right now, there's a BU undergrad continuing my research. So I left something of a legacy when I left BU, which was really important to me. 

So why does this matter? Why is this important? Why am I telling you about this, other than the fact that I need to for class requirement? 

[CHUCKLING] 

Backup plans are super important. If you had asked me in January, what are you going to do with your summer? I would have said, I'm going to Germany. It's going to be awesome. I'm going to learn all this cool lab stuff. 

And what I had to do was take a step back and realize, what is it I actually want to be doing? And what I wanted to be doing was learning lab technique and get comfortable in an environment. And I found a way to do that closer to home. And I really managed to surprise myself with how self-motivated I was when it came to learning an entirely new set of vocabulary that I'd never known before. 

But the most important thing I learned is that scientific research is incredibly problematic. It's super bureaucratic. People are competitive. People don't take you seriously, especially if you're the only female undergrad in the department and the only one that doesn't go to BU. But what I learned is that I love it anyway. And that's what I want to do for a job, despite all the flaws that I found with it that summer. 

So I'd like to think my PI, Dr. Ian Davison. My lab mates, Dr. [INAUDIBLE], Carl Budlong, Ellen [? Makowski, ?] and Kelsey Williford. This is us at the beach my last day at the internship. We went to the North Shore. 

The entire rest of the Neurobio Department at Boston University. But most importantly, Jenny Watermill at the CDC, because without her, I would not have ended up with an internship at all. So thank you and enjoy my co-panelists.