It's scary how a three-month internship can impact your life so much, it'll be stuck with me for the rest of my career. It isnt only the wonderful lab people, but the total experience of stepping into unknown territory. Just at the beginning of the year, I didnt know what molecular cloning was but now, not only can i work those big scary centrifuges and grow colonies of bacteria... i can now do it with confidence that the centrifuges wouldnt explode.

I was admiring someone's agarose gel tank filled with TAE buffer the other day and it brought back heaps of memories of the endless gels we had to run along with the many gels we casted as a preparatory measure. Scary, but I can even remember the scent of TEMED in the air when someone was casting gel. The many bottles of DPBS we wasted just to wash our blots, the amount of ECL and West Femto reagents used, the rush (literally) to the dark room to develop them and the many timers beeping in the dark room.

I remember my first go with fluorescence immunocytochemistry. Boy was that horrendous! I remember coverslips breaking cos I wasnt gentle enough and the long confocal sessions with many visits from the lab mates. Now, with the tonnes of immunohistochemistry, I probably can flip coverslips with more ease since IHC engenders highly delicate handling.

Then there was always the queue for the culture hood. Always a long queue even for the waterbath to warm up the media. THere's always time for a good bonding session be it splitting cells, transfecting them or purely changing the media. For some reason, I always liked harvesting the cells. That's like the highlight of in vitro work i guess. LOL... in my opinion that is.

Here's to the people that gave me an experience, so splendid that it stuck with me forever.







And the work bench (at its relatively cleared state) where I slogged ... ...



Cheerios.. :)