After repeating stories many times over the past few days, it's clear that I need a better method of telling people about what I'm doing this summer. So, the clear solution in this technological world of ours? A blog.
I've been in Houston now for 4 days for TMC-SRIP (Texas Medical Center Summer Research Internship Program -- phew). We got here on Monday and moved into Brown College, a dorm at Rice University. We're all in regular dorm rooms, and my roommate happens to be from China! Her name is Sophia (okay, technically Sun Yue, but who goes by their real name these days? Certainly not me...) and she goes to college somewhere in Texas. She's really nice and we get along well so far (at least my strange sleeping habits haven't gotten to her yet!). Also, her mentor is Dr. Escalante, and I want to say she was Brigit and/or Nick B's mentor down here (...is that right?).
Since we moved in, we had dinner on Monday with Dr. Storl, our Augie professor, and her family at a seafood restaurant, with $25 meals on the Augie credit card! Then starting on Tuesday we had our orientation at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC). We talked about some things and got our MDACC badges, then got a short "tour," meaning we walked on part of the sky bridge (which connects a lot of the buildings) and really only saw a small fraction of the place! The entire Texas Medical Center (TMC) Campus is ginormous, so it's been interesting navigating around it.
After orientation on Tuesday, we all went to meet our mentors. Dr. Storl dropped all of us off at our respective offices (with room numbers like Y7.6028 -- YIKES!), so I met my mentor, Dr. Mary Robinson, at the University of Texas (UT) Medical School Building (MSB), where she then took me to her office in the Center for Laboratory Animal Medicine and Care (CLAMC) at the UT Medical School Extension (MSE). From there, I met a few people in her department, namely Kelly Garner, who basically is in charge of all the administrative stuff at CLAMC (and she's awesome). She and another woman, Ms. Jimmie, took me to the registrar to get my UT badge so I can get into the building (FYI -- registrar offices are universally cranky, not just at Augie). That was pretty much the end of my day, so they dropped me back off at Brown.
From there, we went grocery shopping at the Fiesta. Unfortunately, we don't have any pots or pans or really anything at all to cook with, but yet somehow we unknowingly filled an entire cart full of food for only 5 girls. So, with our ingenuity, we made frozen pizzas on the rack of the oven, ripped up a head of lettuce with our hands for salad and made baked potatoes. However, with nothing to put on our potatoes, we invented a new form of potato: the Italian Potato! It's comprised of... baked potatoes and Italian dressing (surprisingly, not too bad!).
I've been going to bed early, meaning 11pm, which, if you know me, is early. Getting up at 7am is still not so pleasant, however. Other than that, I've been doing a lot of orientation type stuff. I've had to sit through quite a few speakers over lab safety and such, and next week I'll be taking a few classes on how to handle different types of animals (mice & rodents, rabbits, and non-human primates). I've wandered around TMC a bit after work every day to try to orient myself (which, trust me, is not easy), but I can get from one building to the next, for the most part -- or at least the ones that are relevant to me and my internship, haha. I'm getting around just fine on the MetroRail, too, although walking to and from work isn't so bad either (while the weather isn't too terribly hot for now).
Tonight we wandered down to Rice Village, which has lots of shopping and restaurants and things. We ended up finding a secondhand bookstore and spent almost 2 hours in it (!!) but they even had the dissection manual I'm going to need for class in the fall at about 80% off of what I would pay at the Augie bookstore! So although we only explored a small part of Rice Village, we'll definitely be heading back ASAP.
So that's about it... I'll close with some of the new acronyms I've learned this week:
TMC
MDACC
MSB
MSE
CLAMC
UT
BCM
CPB
...more to come, I'm sure!
jd
