Week 7: Work Enviornment
Jeez. What a week.
Over the course of the summer I have been putting together a research project, which culminated in a poster, which was supposed to be printed this morning, so that I could present it at NIH poster day a week from tomorrow. Supposed to. Not quite how it happened. Let it suffice to say it’s been a long week of overly long days filled with edit after edit to my poster and technical difficulties. As of today, it’s officially done, and I’ll print early next week. Phew.
On a brighter note: highlight of the week. I’ve been to some more truly fascinating lectures this week. On Monday, the fMRI lecture series that I attend was on the use of MRI in MS diagnosis, which was really the type of neuroimaging application which I am interested in pursuing. The clarity with which that project was done was astounding. Yesterday I had the chance to attend a lecture from a professor visiting from Cambridge, who is looking at working memory deficiencies in patients with schizophrenia. I took a class this past semester at Wake on memory, and I was constantly curious about the neural underpinnings of memory, and this was a brilliant glimpse into that realm. It was nice to see that cutting edge and fascinating research is also being conducted in academia.
As for the actual content of this week’s blog: the environment in my work space. This feels a little repetitive after last week’s post, so I’m going to talking a little more about my involvement and overlap with the longitudinal TBI study. As I’ve explained previous, the entire TBI team is made up of many smaller, working, moving parts. The PI on the study is the head of the Rehabilitation Medicine department, so he’s obviously a busy guy. There are physical therapists, and vocational therapists, whom I know very little about. There is a biostatistician who helps with the study design and data analysis (although in my portion of the lab, we all analyze our own data…) and so on and so forth. I work under a contract researcher from the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM), who heads the neuropsych team. I really like the team environment of our mini team.
We all work together (both this little team, and the overall TBI team) quite often. It feels like almost every day we have some kind of team meeting where some combination of folks get together and discuss project progress across a WIDE variety of project that are being conducted across RMD (remember, all the patients in the NIHCC are in some sort of clinical trial, so we’re all invested in our own research project in one way or another). But from there, we are left on our own to figure our work out. That’s one thing I really like about the neuropsych team: although we’re all in one big office, the four of us are a little square of cubicals off by ourselves, where we often joke around or discuss highly scientific concepts. Oh, and lots of bitching, naturally. But it is a really nice balance of knowing be are all smart enough and driven enough people to do our work on our own, to figure it out and get it done, but then in various teams all across the department we are constantly bouncing ideas off of each other, whether its discussing DTI measured white matter tracks in our cubical box, or reviewing each other’s manuscripts at team meetings, there’s a great balance of isolated and solitary work balance against teamwork. It works well for me.
Until next time!
