A Brand New Year - STEM Intern 2013-2014!

September 8th, 2013 Time went by so fast and it has already been a week since the school start! This year, I am really glad that I got the opportunity to participate in EWS STEM Internship program again. However, it feels different doing an internship this year, especially after the intern experiences from last year and from this past summer. Last year, I focused more on learning lab techniques and the principles under systematic and molecular biology, and this past summer I practiced a lot of these techniques such as PCR, digestion, and gel electrophoresis. Thus, this year I hope I can learn more advanced techniques such as western blot.  If possible, I wish to have my own project to work on, which would allow me to be familiar with the process - question, hypothesis, experiments, and results - that a lab project is involved in. Last but not least, I would like to explore my topic of interest (molecular / cellular biology, genetics, oncology) even more in depth. I am very exciting for the program to start, and I believe this year will be another wonderful year!

The image on the left shows a cell undergoing extocytosis, and the image on the right shows the vesicles on dock located in the synapse in the cerebellar cortex. My work for this past summer involved in a protein that participated in intracellular trafficking in yeast. The image is retrieved from Collins Lab at Cornell Univeristy. http://blogs.cornell.edu/collinslab/