Follow me along on a busy day from work in the East Asian Library to surgery in my research lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
I'm still getting used to vlogging so bear with the swinging camera+being out of the frame. I also switched between more a more serious/no-talking style of vlogging like my last video and a more personal/talking style of vlogging. Hopefully the switching between styles wasn't too awkward or hard to watch.
I was doing research over the summer in preparation for my senior thesis; I was basically getting a head start on the experimental portion of the thesis. If you're interested in what the goal of my surgery was, I was injecting an AAV (a virus) that would cause neurons in the shell of the ventromedial hypothalamus (or wherever I ended up injecting) to express GCaMP (a calcium indicator--basically indicating neuronal activity) and cause the neurons to fluoresce when active. I was also implanting a fiber through which I would be able to capture the photons released by the neurons and digitize the signal so that I could get a digital read-out of the summated activity in this region as the mouse reacted to stimuli. This method of recording neural activity is known as fiber photometry.
Also, I'm still an undergraduate who knows VERY VERY little about neuroscience and just the world in general. I learned almost all of the things that I needed to know to do surgery from my PI, post-doc/lab manager, and grad students in the lab. I probably am not 100% correct about everything said in this video so if you have more information about any of these things, please correct me in the comments below. I also did not show/talk through many of the other steps involved in surgery because it probably would have taken too long. Hopefully the information that I did go through gave you a good sense of what the process is GENERALLY like.
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A Day in the Life of Ivy League Student
A Day in the Life Princeton
A day in the life in the lab
A day in the life of an American college student
Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Undergraduate Neuroscience
Princeton Undergraduate
Part time job at the library