Internship Blog

Monthly Archives: June 2012

My lab research is heating up with the summer

Posted on by Posted in Health and Wellness, Internships, Research .

Wow… things have been quite busy in the lab!  There are so many different techniques and skills that I am learning.  This past week I learned how to do “immunocy to chemistry.”  The basis on this technique is having a primary antibody tag a protein (in my case GPR109A) and then have a secondary antibody that binds the primary antibody.  This secondary antibody is conjugated with a fluorescence tag that I can then use to visualize the presence of the protein.  

The picture shows the images produced from a fluorescent microscope.  The blue color is the stain for the nucleus known as DAPI.  The red stain represents the GPR109A receptors.  We also wanted a green stain to appear that was suppose to be a marker to prove that we were looking at endothelium cells.  Unfortunately, for some reason, this stain didn’t appear.  Looks like we’ll have to do some trouble shooting to figure out why it’s not staining or try to find another protocol!  Hopefully I will have better results by my next post! Thanks for reading!

Installation becomes the final piece to design

Posted on by Posted in Interior Design, Internships .

Since my last blog post I have been very busy with helping out around the studio and on appointments. One of the designers that I mentioned in my last post was out on medical leave last week, so I helped her out by taking on appointments for her since she couldn’t be there. I went to five different houses for installations of shades, shutters, and blinds. It is important for the designers to go out to the installations to make sure that it is installed correctly and that it looks the way the homeowner wanted it to appear. At the first house, I was at a woman’s home who was getting new drapes and a Hunter Douglas shade in her home office. The installation went smoothly, and we were ready for the next appointment.

Interior Design, Blinds Installation, Decorating, InternshipAt The second home, we had to install five top-down, bottom-up roman shades. (See picture.) These types of shades are great for bedrooms because they allow light to come in from the top and still have privacy in the room. These shades can be pulled up like and normal shade (from bottom to the top of the window), and they also can be pulled from the top to the bottom of the sill. One of the reasons that the homeowner loved this type of shade was because of her dogs. When the window was open, the dogs would look out and bark at everything they saw. She could never have natural light in her room without hearing her dogs barking at people outside. Now that she has top-down, bottom-up shades she can pull the shade down from the top and allow natural into her bedroom.

The last house I went to on Friday was one of Lori’s clients that I visited a few weeks earlier. This was exciting for me because it has been one of the few designs that I have seen from start to finish. A few weeks ago we went to her house to pick out fabrics for the drapes in her living room and fabric for the valance in her kitchen. We also decided on styles for the drape and valence. Once we figured that out, we were able to order it for her, and then I was back at the installation! I made sure that everything went smoothly and, in the end, the homeowner loved how it looked and was very pleased with the results.

The pace of my internship speeds up…

Posted on by Posted in Internships .

This week I spent a lot of time conducting research and putting my findings into Excel spreadsheets. As a Communication student, I hadn’t had much experience working with Excel so it was a learning process for me.

One part of my research involved making telephone calls to local businesses. This can be challenging! I was mid-sentence with a lady when she put me through to voicemail. Lesson learned: Try to be as personable on the phone as possible!

The past week has been crazy busy, which I love!

Big Data – What it is and how companies utilize it

Posted on by Posted in Internships, Marketing, Research .

Before I started my internship at SAS, I had never heard of the term “big data.” By definition it means data of such volume, variety or velocity that an organization must move beyond its comfort zone technologically to derive intelligence for effective decisions. To put this in a college example: you have so much music, movies, pictures, documents, etc. on your computer that you are going to need to buy a new computer or hard drive. Businesses are now holding so much data that it is impossible to make sense out of it without analytical software.

Now I am not going to be “that guy” who just writes a marketing pitch about how great SAS software is (which it is). However, I do want to stress how important analytics are in today’s business world. Marketers use analytics every day to evaluate consumer behavior patterns, determine target markets and much more. This week I am starting a project to work on a taxonomy that can help SAS’s Social Media Analytics software find relevant information on its major competitors from, you guessed it, social media. I’ll let you know how it goes next week!

 

The best kind of research eventually equals results

Posted on by Posted in Chemistry, Internships, Research .

WFU, Wake Forest University, Chemistry, Research, Lab, Experiential LearningGlad you checked back with me to learn about my Plan B. In my last update, I was having trouble with maintaining constant current on the Bio-Rad CE. After talking with Dr. Colyer, we decided to make the switch to another CE instrument in the lab. The goal was to test my samples and method on the Beckman-Coulter instrument and compare to the Bio-Rad…if we got reproducibility, and then there was nothing wrong with the Bio-Rad, but if we got different data, well you understand.

At the helm of the Beckman, it was time to learn all about the software package, how the instrument is setup, make a new capillary specifically for the Beckman cartridges, and much more. Just as with the Bio-Rad…I made the capillary 50μm X 30cm, filled the buffer and solution vials, and created my methods in the software. First and foremost the capillary had to be conditioned (approx. 1.5 hours).

WOW…I finally began to see results from my separations! Now that things are looking better, I began two tests: (1) Injection Pressure – change the injection pressure where as pressure increases so should the response, (2) Voltage – change the separation voltage where as voltage increases the response should appear earlier in time. In the pressure test, 10, 20, 30, and 40 psi-sec methods were tested while in the voltage test, 10, 15, and 20 kV methods were tested. This created a lot of data and graphs to analyze.

Albert Einstein said, “If we knew what is was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” I hope you will check back soon for another update from the lab…now I must get to analyzing the data and charts to figure out where to go next!