First Week of Urban Semester

I moved into my apartment located in Chinatown this past week and it took less than a day to realize I don't really know how to cook! Luckily, my neighbor (my aunt's aunt's sister - yes it's very confusing) is always around to help me. Yesterday, I tried to make a bowl of rice, but it actually turned into a bowl of rice soup. I still need to work on that...

Anyway, I began my first day of Cornell Summer Urban Semester program on Tuesday. The program consists of about 30 Cornell students of different age groups (some actually graduated already) who are mostly interested in medicine. There are a few including me that are also interested in research as well. This week mostly consisted of Prof. Beck describing the purpose of the program, which is to show us disparities that exist in medicine. We'll be seeing this by comparing our shadowing experiences in the New York Presbyterian Hospital (Upper East Side) to Woodhull Hospital (North Brooklyn).

In terms of shadowing, I only had one rotation this week because of Memorial Day and the program just starting. But yesterday, I shadowed a neurobiologist named Dr. Michael Glass who is performing research on opiate addiction and withdrawal in mice. He first introduced his research and explained how he is mostly interested in the effect of opiates on uOR, NMDA, and AMPA receptors in the central amygdala (CEA). Afterwards, we went to a seminar (similar to a journal club presentation) in which a post-doc was presenting a study similar to Dr. Glass', but her work focuses on the hypothalamus. For the rest of the day, I was working with his technician who gave me a tour of the lab and introduced me to the methods of histology. After taking a look at just a few sections, I realized that looking at neurons in a textbook compared to real-life neurons is VERY different. The dendrites, somas, and axons come in all sorts of shapes.

Well, thats it for now. I took some pictures this week but I don't have a slot on my computer for my memory card. I'll try to add them in my next post!