Bridget Ollesch ’15, Bowen Fellow in Children’s Research

If there is a take-home message from my work this week, it would be that research can be…well…messy. I have been working on collecting important information, such as post-operative complications, operative time, days in ICU, and estimated blood loss along with many other variables. To find this information I have to comb through old medical charts and decipher the various notes recorded by surgeons, doctors, and nurses (who, by the way, all record their notes in different styles). In theory, this sounds like a fairly simple task, which is the preconceived notion I had. The problem, however, is that in order to collect this data I have to be able to find the notes from surgery. For this project, the patient population we are researching, patients with myelomeningocele who have undergone spinal fusions, is fairly small. In order to get enough data, the project is including patients who had the spinal fusion up to fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, the medical charts were often paper form. These paper documents should have been uploaded to Epic, the database where medical information is now stored. The reason it is difficult to find many of the old medical charts is because sometimes the documents are filed according to when they were uploaded, not the day of the surgery. To add to the problem, they are often recorded under some nonspecific title like “historic documents”, in which the surgical notes may be uploaded, but along with pages and pages of medical documents (and not the medical documents I am looking for). This means I have to look through tons and tons of information in order to find the notes related to the patient’s spinal fusion. In other cases, the documents may not have been uploaded yet, in which case it becomes necessary to contact medical records to order a copy of the paper form. This can be frustrating at times, but when I do find and review the patients’ charts I find it very interesting. It is fun to read about the different procedures performed, and I have begun to notice trends. For example, some common post-operative complications many of these patients have are severe infection or hardware malfunction. I feel like I have become fairly good at navigating medical charts through this process, which is an important skill because of my future professional goals.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am also working on viewing x-rays in order to record radiographic measures. I have to look at the curve of the spine and the degree of pelvic obliquity both before and after surgery. It is very encouraging to see how a patient with a very severe curve will have an almost completely straight spine after fusion. Not only is it encouraging, but it also supports my desire to enter the medical field. Below are some photos of the radiographic measures I am referring to. (The x-ray isn’t a photo of measurements I have done myself because I don’t want to release any sensitive information, but, nevertheless, it gets the point across).

Claire McGuire ’14, Mansfield Foundation Fellow in Community Outreach

Human Rights work isn’t really a 9-5 sort of career. This is becoming evident to me as I work side by side

On one of the only nice days we all went for lunch. Left to right: Patrick Atkinson, Shana Anderson, Rebecca Kotz, Jon Okstad, Michael Johnson, Me!

with people who are as passionate about righting the worlds injustices as I am.  At lunch I got into a heated discussion with Rebecca, another intern at the project, and it led to an exchange of all kinds of materials, movies, books and articles on the subjects that we care so much about.  This summer so far feels like a block on top of a job.  I am learning so much and every night I am sent home with something new to think about and new materials to change my opinion on concepts that I thought I had a grasp of.  Currently I am reading a book called Pornland by Gail Dines and it is certainly eye opening.  As the movement to stop sexual slavery and all other forms of sexual violence against women has moved away from victim blaming (about time)  there is a renewed search for what might cause this problem and Dines believes it has something to do with our cultures pornographic saturation. I’m not sure I am fully convinced by her overall argument but she presents some solid proof that things like rape porn and child pornography have become much more prevalent since the advent of the internet; regardless of societal effect child porn is in and of itself a wrong.  So these are the kinds of happy debates and materials that occupy my free time here, which is fine because Minneapolis has been pretty dreary lately and the weather seems to reflect the tilt of my thoughts.

Things have been bustling and productive at work though.  I am really getting into full swing here and have a bunch of projects in the works at once, sometimes things get a little overwhelming.  I am working on a pretty large grant and have the first draft of my Letter of Interest done except for some hard numbers that I want to plug in.  I’m waiting on the staff in Antigua to scan me some receipts.  Right now is their busiest time, with multiple service teams down at once, so I am not holding my breath on that one.   I have also been arranging opportunities for Patrick and the rest of the staff to get out and about around town to spread awareness.  We have a few speaking engagements along with a bunch of smaller venues in the works and I hope to have even more success with events once the weather clears up.  I am amazed at how much of everyday is spent coordinating.  Finding numbers, addresses and dates.  Figuring out who is in charge of what, and what their resources are, how much decision making power they have and when they will be able to make that decision.  On Cornell’s campus, I remember being able to walk down the ped mall and get everything I needed just by running into people. I love that about Cornell, but let me tell you Minneapolis is a much bigger network. Navigating that network and all of the non-profits and volunteers in it can be challenging, but I think I’m up to the task.

Another one of my big projects has to do with creating a new packet of materials for volunteer involvement and outreach.  One of our biggest programs takes groups from across the country, classes, churches, camps, or community groups and sends them to Antigua to volunteer.  They build small houses, help in Casa Jackson (center for malnourished infants), lend a hand at the clinics or teach in the Dreamer Center.  Everyone comes home inspired and wanting to do more, yet until now we did nothing to reach out to them again.  Jon, the director of benefactor services, and I are trying to fix that.  We are writing and re-writing letters and calls to action, as well as devising a three pronged strategy for how to keep volunteers involved and spreading the word about global poverty and human slavery.  It is going really well and we have the first drafts of our letters done,  I even made a presentation template that can be sent to those who want to give a presentation on what they did abroad to their community members.

After reviewing it, Mike has agreed to teach me how to use Photoshop, I am going to skip from being affronted to be excited by this new tool.  It is super useful and fun to use and I have already started to create campaigns with it.  My first set of banners were made to advertise our charity golf tournaments happening in July and August. I already had a design to work off of so it was a great first project. You can see it here as well as on our webpage, gcpstore.org.

One of the best parts of the whole week though was when Jon came into my office and asked if I wanted a break from the computer screen to help with some mindless mailings.  I said sure and we went to the conference table to address and send out fathers day cards that had been sent to us from Guatemala.  They were from the orphans and underprivileged children in Antigua too their sponsor fathers from around the world.  THEY WERE SO CUTE.  One little girl made a shirt and tie out of paper that you opened and then wrote a card.  It was pretty cool to see all of the children’s literacy, not to mention the care and time that was put into each card. Here is one example:

It says Happy Father’s Day!

On that pretty adorable note I’m signing off from my second post, I wish all the Dads out their a Happy Father’s Day!

Jessika Castillo-Rivera ’14, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

Okay, remember when I said I digitized over 900 photos for the Virgil Powell Collection? According to my digital output (sometimes you scan the backs of images too, if there is important information written on them, but for this collection that was a rare thing), I actually digitized over 2,000. When you spend 8 hours standing around and scanning items, you get into a rhythm, and uh, maybe lose track of how much work you’re really getting done.

Virgil Powell, courtesy of the African American Museum of Iowa

That is one of the images I digitized, which isn’t online yet. Shh. When his materials go live online, I highly suggest checking them out. Or better yet, make your way to the museum. Powell is an incredibly interesting man. Outside of his professional work, he was an amateur photographer and author. That should give you a bit of insight as to why we have over 2,000 photos. A lot of the time Powell was playing around with filters, so we have Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow versions of the ‘same’ photos. Don’t worry, we only digitize one. Realistically, just his photo collection is probably closer to 2,500+ than anything else. Oh, and don’t get me started on the documents! Writers. They love drafts.

Everyone else blogging seems to be giving you a breakdown of the research they’re doing, so I thought I’d give a bit of a breakdown as to what my weeks are normally like.

Monday: A staff meeting is implemented by our new director Michael. Our old director (and one of the founders of the museum) Tom, retired after my second week. Tom was great, kind and patient, so while I still enjoy seeing him around the museum sometimes, I’m in the firm camp that he should be at home relaxing or golfing. Returning to Michael and our new staff meetings though. Essentially, the meetings are to give everyone a look at what everyone else is doing for the week. Even interns are required to go, and we’re kind of treated like staff, which was something I wasn’t really expecting. We have the option to lead the meeting, etc. It’s new, and while there have only been two, I’m wondering if they don’t waste more time than anything else. For an archivist, an hour to an hour and a half handling materials can really make a difference in a project. If I’m working with the Virgil Powell Collection, I can probably get 200-300 photos sorted in that time. But hey, when you’re on the management side of things, I can see needing to be on the same page as everyone else. Education people are doing very different things than I do, so are the people writing grants (and by people I mean person, and his name is Grant), etc. Ah, office politics.

After the meeting, I usually work on the oral histories. I’m working on two, Adult Voices and The Only One. Let me say something first. I’m obsessed with storytelling. I love it. I’m double majoring in History and Classical studies because I believe they’re the vehicles use use to tell our stories, how we shape the world. When I heard that the museum had collected oral histories I was kind of over the moon. I wanted to work with those, ASAP. Having them as one of my big projects was perfect, especially with my strong background in technology. Now, I’m specifically here at the museum to learn about curatorial and archival best practices within the context of a historical museum, and while I talk about my work with the Powell Collection a lot, and it is kind of the traditional archival work, proper digital storage, maintenance, organization methods are incredibly important in a museum. That is what I have been doing with the oral histories. There are 100+ of them, and they were done by different people, at different times, and taken in different formats. For a tech person, you just kind of have to sigh, especially when your museum software (Past Perfect) only likes certain kinds of file formats. So I start from the bottom up. I take the boxes that have transcripts and the disks (they’ve all been put on to DVDs, thank goodness!) and start to rip them onto the computer. None of the transcripts are digital, but luckily some of them are already online. I take those, make .pdfs, and wait for each disk to rip. I considered .doc files, but who is to say everyone will be running Office, or that someone may not delete a segment on accident? Another plus, .pdfs are relatively streamline.

These oral histories are videos of various lengths, and they come off the disk as .VOB files. Over the past two weeks (weeks 2 and 3), all the files are ripped…relatively successfully.

Tuesday: Felicite is in! Felicite is a consulting archivist. She works on the computer that I normally do with the Past Perfect software, adding search terms, updating the archives, etc. She makes sure everything digital reflects our actual holdings to the best of our ability, and that means everything from taking an object and measuring its dimensions to identifying people in various collection photos. While Felicite is working, I work on other things. Mainly the Virgil Powell Collection. After digitizing the collection, now it is time to start to sort, house, and organize. Traditionally, you keep the natural order of a collection, which is how you received the collection from the donor. The Powell Collection had no natural order, so it is up to me to figure something out. Which is what I started this week (week 4), but we’ll get to that later. Instead I spend all of Tuesday and Thursday putting 2,000+ photos into sleeves. Sleeves are what I call photo envelopes.

Wednesday: Return to the oral histories! Troubleshoot should probably be my middle name, because while I finish the transcripts, and scan in the ones that didn’t exist digitally, many of the files are corrupt. I decide to just finish ripping everything, create a physical log of all the things that need to be done (find master copy, rip file, convert to .wmv, rename, store, upload to Past Perfect, edit metadata).

Thursday: Felicite is back. Felicite works Tuesdays and Thursdays, if you didn’t get that before. So I return to the Powell collection and finish putting everything into photo envelopes.

Friday: Sabryna is in (another consulting archivist who is in most days but works more with objects) and is using the computer for half the day. While she does that I start to sort and organize the Powell Collection. Now, if I’m being honest, I should have probably started to write a finding guide before I started this. Real fast though, this is what a finding guide is. So while I still feel like I should have started a guide before actual sorting and eventual organization, I’ve seen all these photos at least twice, and there was no natural order to speak of, for a life with many interests over a long period of time. Realistically, writing a guide after the fact may be smarter, but time has yet to tell. I decide to break everything up by vague categories, then I’ll keep working my way in to become more and more specific. So I have professional, family, and personal lives. Breakdown becomes more specific per category, and all of this is evolving as I go along. For instance, there is a personal – amateur photography – activity – vehicular folder. This means that these photos were taken by Powell, display an activity, and it involves some kind of moving vehicle. We have personal – amateur photography – still life, personal – amateur photography – architecture and landscapes, personal – amateur photography – activity – leisure, and it goes on and on. While I know there are photos in the collection that just don’t have a set place, like the following, which is really cool but who knows what was happening here. It’s a start.

JAP SUB – 10-15-1943, courtesy of the African American Museum

When Sabryna goes home, I go back to the oral histories. I sort and weed out all the corrupt video files! I even upload all the videos to Past Perfect, ignoring all the corrupt videos so I can search for the master copies and hope they aren’t damaged as well. At 3:54pm Past Perfect won’t respond (this isn’t a big deal, sometimes systems get a little stressed out when you’re running large programs, ripping large videos, and converting other large videos all at the same time). I leave it be usually, and it take a bit, but everything goes smoothly. I return at 4:00pm and Past Perfect has ‘unexpectedly closed.’ I start up Past Perfect and see that all my uploading work hasn’t been recorded. I take it as a sign to go home, because come on.

That was Week 3. You get the idea though, because I powered through researching and revising outdated museum traveling exhibits for re-print, the basic exhibition and label writing skills of the internship as been a little light lately. But no longer! Today (Tuesday of Week 4) I got a really cool project that I can’t wait to tell you all about next week.

Brianna Christensen ’16, Dimensions Fellow in Research

Week two has been pretty exciting for me! I’ve started a few more projects, and I’m beginning to see the results! As I mentioned in my previous post, I did start a project involving NFN and PTU. Unfortunately, some of the embryos that I had left to look at their movement, all of the ones in NFN died, so I was left with the control embryos and the ones only in PTU. However, it turned out to be okay because I used those to test out the behavioral machine. The machine is able to detect their movement through the embryos pigmentation. The embryos in PTU no long have pigmentation, and there lies the problem. We placed them in red dye to see if they would absorb the color and if the machine would be able to detect the color. The embryos did absorb the color, but the results of their movement make it difficult to determine if the machine was actually able to see them.

This is the program used to detect the embryos’ movement. When they move, green lines appear following their movement.

Since the embryos in NFN died, we decided to try again. We added a petri dish with a lower concentration of NFN, and we also added another dish with a lower concentration of NFN and PTU. We also thought that maybe they had to be out of their embryonic sacs for the drug to actually affect them which would possibly explain why they died after 48  hours. We also made a couple of other adjustments to either keep the embryos alive or to make sure that NFN was working.

We also placed embryos in hydrogen peroxide, and this is suppose to create oxidative stress which will become more useful later on. As of right now, it doesn’t look it it had much of an effect on the embryos, so either we new hydrogen peroxide or we need a higher concentration.

After learning some of the basic procedures, I have been instructed in how to perform a qPCR. I am learning why they perform so many repetitions with this procedure. I have completed four trials, and my results have changed. I have really good results, some okay results, and some results where I sit there thinking, “what on earth…”. The point of this is to compare the levels of gene expression for pink1, TH1, and TH2 between a mutant zebrafish’s cDNA and its wildtype sibling’s.

This is the qPCR machine.

This is the program used to run the machine and collect the data, so I can analyze it.

I’ve been able to get to know those in my lab fairly well, and today we are getting frozen yogurt ! I’ve made plans outside of the lab as well. I will be donating plasma for the first time tomorrow. I’m really excited for that! One of my housemates also asked me if I wanted to go to the farmer’s market with her next week, so I’ll have pictures of that for next time!

This is shows the development of the embryos. It’s a lot cooler in person!

Fun fact: it takes about a month for a zebrafish to become fully grown!

Katlyn Arndt ’15, Brent Fellow in Neurology and Medicine

This week I continued learning about REM sleep behavioral disorder. As I mentioned before, REM sleep behavioral disorder (RBD) is the enactment of dreams during REM sleep. Approximately 0.5% of the general population is affected by RBD, the majority occurring in men. In order to be diagnosed with RBD a patient must (1) have dream enactment and (2) REM sleep without atonia (RSWA) as illustrated on the polysomnograph. Typically, patients with RBD have over 25% RSWA. In the lab, we are learning how to quantify RSWA by scoring muscle movements that occur in the chin, leg, and arm during REM sleep. The polysomnograph is divided into 30-second epochs, where we score phasic and tonic muscle activity. One of the aims of this study is to determine whether the amount of RSWA varies to the underlying causation of RBD.

Figure A illustrates normal REM sleep while Figure B illustrates REM sleep without atonia. The three red arrows show the leads of the chin, leg, and arm. (Boeve et al, 2009)

On Wednesday, I attended a conference regarding shared decision making and personalized treatment. In general, over 50% of patients wish to have an active role in their medical decisions. A visiting doctor presented on this topic, which had an underlying focus of Crohn’s disease. Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease. The symptoms aren’t severe in the beginning, but if untreated they can become complicated very quickly. He emphasized the importance of patients understanding their disease and making informed decisions about their treatment. In the case of Crohn’s disease, patients did not realize the severity of the disease, leading them to choose not to take medication. The visiting doctor has been working on a Decision Aid, a personalized report showing the risks and benefits associated with certain treatments.

In addition, our survey-based project regarding epilepsy was recently approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). We had a lab meeting on Friday to discuss the aims and hypotheses of the project. The project will analyze the quality of life as well as the occurrence of sleep disturbances, such as sleep apnea and insomnia, in epileptic patients. The following week I will be doing literature review concerning sleep epilepsy co-morbidity to prepare for the project.  We hope to mail out the questionnaires by late June/early July.

David Yamaguchi ’15, Dimensions Fellow in Research

View from the overpass on my walk to my sublet.

This week was referred to as “transgenic week” by the lab members due to the fact that we injected sperm nuclei (which had been modified by the reaction of the nuclei with two of our linearized plasmid constructs) into eggs this week.  And when I say eggs, I mean about five hundred for each construct.  Tuesday was injection day and instead of labeling lots of tiny micro-centrifuge or PCR tubes and pipetting small amounts of liquid between these small tubes, the day was spent using tiny, glass needles back-filled with the REMI reaction mixture and a syringe pump, to poke relatively big holes into about a thousand eggs.  After that experience, we then had two sorting periods where we took the dead embryos or unfertilized eggs out of the Petri dish so the death signals from those sick cells wouldn’t kill the few that had successfully been fertilized.

Joe fertilizing frog eggs with the REMI reaction and showing me the process on the monitor. He’s very good at this.

I’m proud to say that my first injection period (although I took about 3 hours compared to the 3 years of experience guy’s 1 hour) I was able to get about 70% of Joes surviving embryos in the first day.  Yuan, Sarah, and even Dr. Baker were impressed that I was able to attain a number fairly comparable to the graduate student’s success rate.  The members of this lab have been unbelievably supportive and understanding and have made this experience overwhelmingly positive.

I also started working on construct H34 by creating the H34 fragment via PCR.  I came in on Sunday to sort tadpoles and begin the digestion of H34-fragment 1 (H34-f1) in preparation for ligation on Monday. Yes, you read that right.  Tadpoles.

Tadpoles.

After injecting the REMI reaction on Tuesday, not even a week later they already resemble tadpoles and swim around when you stimulate them with a pipette.  It blows my mind that they develop this quickly and that I got to see it happen from the moment we fertilized them.  Now we’ll get to see next week if the gene we inserted is being expressed in at least 10 of them.  The transgenic process practiced in this lab isn’t very efficient, but it’s fast and relatively cheap so we just inject about 500 eggs and hope that 10 of them express our gene.

The FUTURE program offered some meetings this week for the undergraduates.  One meeting went over the graduate school programs offered by the University of Iowa which gave information on who to talk to at what point, what to include on the applications and when to ask who about how to apply, and the various advantages the U of I graduate programs had over other graduate programs.  The presentation was given by Dr. Spitz, a member of several admissions boards and oxidative stress in cancer biology and toxicology researcher who was very vibrant and able to show his excitement for the programs and his research.  There was also an informal reception allowing the undergrads to mingle and talk to one another where I met Brianna from our very own Cornell for the first time as well as some other students from Luther.  We had a very good time talking about the projects we are working on this summer and also having a few laughs about non-research-related things as well.

This next week we’ll be injecting two more constructs while I continue to work on H34.  There is a lot of work to do, but it’ll be no problem with the continued support and guidance from the lab members.

Ni An ’14, Rogers Fellow in Environmental Studies

It’s been a long week. The rain was ceaseless. Day, night; it made no difference. The few times when it let up were just as bad – the sky was gloomy and the air was thick as tar. Every morning, I awaken tired from a bad night’s sleep. The humidity also makes my face swell, and that’s certainly no fun. Being at the lab is a blessing because the AC is always going at full tilt. I hate that I’m not as energetic as I should be – especially when I have so much work to do – but, unfortunately, I can’t control the weather. I want to stay cheerful, but the gloom that hangs in the air makes that unfeasible. I often think of home, and that only serves to make me sadder. Since it rained the entire week I couldn’t go out into the marshes to put out tiles. The bright side of that is that I had time to catch up on the all the stuff I already had to work on.

Thunderstorm at noon under gloomy sky.

Pouring outside the lab.

One characteristic of this internship that I like is that it is easy to set out and collect the tiles with the accumulated sediments. Thankfully, it’s becomes easier than when I first started as I now have more experience and I’m more familiar with the three transects I’ve been working at. However, it takes a long time to process the tiles and obtain the data. To be specific about why it’s hard, here’s the process: after collecting one set of tiles, I clean and transfer the sediments into tubes. This usually takes three hours. After this, three fifths of the samples are put into the centrifuge and are then put into the oven to dry – a three day process. After they are completely dry, I weigh them and burn them in the muffle furnace. The combustion process takes eight hours, and the cooling takes another half a day. After the samples are back to room temperature, I weigh them again so that I can find the organic/inorganic ratio. For the other two fifths of the samples, I process them in the Clemson lab to obtain the grain size distribution. This takes three to four hours – assuming the machine is well behaved. During the sample processing, I start sorting data on Excel. As you can see, getting and analyzing the data is a long process.

Part of containers I use to collect tiles.

My spot in the cooler: samples half-way processed and three new bags of sample.

In addition to cleaning tiles and analyzing samples, I went to the field with Tracy and Susan on Tuesday – the only day it didn’t rain- to collect the water samples which were set out months ago to analyze sulfates and nutrients in the water. We deployed new sample collectors after we collected the old ones. It only took two and a half hours, but the repetitive bending down and getting up made my legs sore for the next two days. It was definitely a good workout that tells me I need more exercise. Another noteworthy thing is that after Tracy taught me how to make different, important graphs, Erik – my other mentor – discussed with me about the current and future schedule and the detailed scientific aspects about the project. We talked about things such as whether the accretion of the sediments is caused by biological activity, the wind, or the tides and how to evaluate the impacts of plant density and elevation on sediment accumulation. It was a good meeting. Of course, as with all meetings I’ve had with my college advisor, I am left with more work and more graphs to make. Patterns can only be found through repetitive trials.

Tracy and Susan pre-processing the water samples before bringing them back to the lab.

Next week, I put out more tiles, so hopefully it’s less rainy and the bugs lay off for a while.

Laura Ettlin ’14 Mansfield Foundation Fellow in Physical Therapy

Week two of my fellowship consisted of my usual housekeeping type responsibilities and learning from the physical therapists. I received my name badge which allows me to access to staff only areas of the main floor. I was introduced to staff outside of the physical therapist rehab setting and am getting more familiar with my way around.

On Friday I followed my supervisor and his patient to learn some new information about human balance. I expanded on my previous knowledge of proprioceptors in joint capsules and their role in balance. I also learned how to challenge the mind and body to work together to improve a patient’s balance by manipulating the method by which the body finds balances. This week I was also introduced to a few more injuries that I have never heard of before. For example, I learned about adhesive capsulitis also known as frozen shoulder. After following several patients who struggle with the pain from scar tissue, I was better able to understand the symptoms and rehab for a patient with frozen shoulder (which is a build up of scar tissue in the shoulder joint and restricting movement).

I have started to see patients session after session and am seeing how patients progress from week to week. I am looking forward to next week to continue observing patients who are recovering from knee replacements. So far I have seen patients in the middle of their rehab (6-8 weeks), and I am excited to observe their state of mobility and strength as they graduate from their physical therapy rehab program.

Caryn Shebowich ’15, Mansfield Foundation Fellow in Non-Profit Management
My supervisor called me a workaholic-in-the-making on Tuesday at 5pm, an hour and a half after I was supposedly “done for the day”.  A red flag flashed repeatedly right in front of my mind’s eye: WARNING. I know that I’ve always had trouble leaving projects unfinished, but this week was a prime example of why that quality may not always lead to the healthiest life choices for me. Naturally, I came in the following day and stayed even later. I know, roll your eyes. But hey, at least I love my job enough to stick around after hours. Regardless, I clearly need to work on setting myself some time limits.

I am not proud to say that, up to this point, this is not an uncommon conundrum for me. As I said, unfinished projects frequently drive me up the wall. As a student on the Cornell Hilltop, there is always something going on while I’m at school, be it a twelve page paper, a Student Senate meeting or a midterm exam. I am used to having a long to-do list. In fact, I relish having a long to-do list. So when I was presented with a spreadsheet a mile long of event signs to be created for Texas Swing (including but not limited to 95 gift certificate labels, eighteen reserved table signs, and over twenty miscellaneous event signs), I was anxious to start crossing items off the list. I buckled down, saddled up and printed more than 50 color pages of signage to be hung all over Saturday’s fundraiser (which, unfortunately, I have to miss as I am currently out of town for the weekend at a family bar mitzvah).

As I experimented my way through the labyrinth of multiple graphic design programs, I was grateful for the experience of having previously designed lobby displays for Cornell Theatre productions and countless fliers for campus activities. Hours of practice in my residence hall or on my computer or in my professors’ offices primed me to work on visual projects quickly under pressure. It has developed my eye for what looks good and developed my computer and motor skills so I can produce what looks good fast. Practice over the last two years saved me boatloads of time and frustration while I worked to contribute to Texas Swing. It let me focus on what I was doing and not how I was doing it.
And I did fully focus. It proved to be such an engrossing project that my twenty hour, 3 day work week became almost thirty hours. I was just making up for the time I am out of town this weekend, right? Jokes aside, though, I did learn a lot this week. Among other things, I can now

-Use Adobe InDesign

-Run a Facebook campaign as a business (scheduling posts and everything!)

-Assemble silent auction materials for hundreds of people, and

-Mail-merge any Microsoft Office programs under the sun in very little time.

As she helped me put together the above list in my weekly wrap-up /processing meeting, my supervisor, asked me what personal skills I had learned in addition to the logistical skills. I was reminded then of why I am in Austin. This fellowship is not just to learn the logistics of computer programs or the semantics of event planning. It is also to learn about me. Logistic skills are great and now I won’t have to learn them later on, but equally as important: This week I learned to exercise my patience, reel in my perfectionism in order to produce a quality product in a timely fashion, and attend to my own personal needs, even (and especially) when that involves setting myself some time limits.

Next week I start training for case management. I will be shadowing real life case managing sessions, reading a training manual thicker than my dictionary, and preparing to take on my own case. Butterflies in my stomach cannot even begin to cover it.

I am itching to share more about my life in Austin, but one blog post can only hold so much. I will leave it at this: another week, albeit a short one, has flown by faster than I’d like. I am so lucky to have the time I do in such a rich, nurturing city and workplace. Thanks to all who have made it so and thanks for reading!

Bridget Ollesch ’15, Bowen Fellow in Children’s Research

This has been a very productive week for me. After all of the reading I did last week, I was ready to start entering some data. This past week I have been working on calling patients to see if they are willing to help us with our research project. If they say yes, then we mail them consent forms and questionnaires. It was exciting to get to actually talk to some of the patients and to put a personality to information on a patient chart. In addition to that, I have started gathering important data, such as demographic information. I also have been working with the research assistant and my site mentor to decide what information is the most important to collect. I have already started to look through the medical charts of those patients who have agreed to participate in order to start collecting this information.

Another exciting part of this research is that I will be taking radiographic measurements of pelvic obliquity and the degree of curve the patient had in their spine, both before and after spinal fusion. These are important variables we will be collecting for our study, to see if they have any relation to complications in spinal fusions for patients with spina bifida. It is really exciting to be learning such an important skill. I met with my site mentor, Dr. Georgopoulos, on Tuesday so that she could provide me with instruction. I was really glad because I had only briefly met her before. She was very patient with me as she was teaching me this new skill, which I’m sure was very easy for her. Often times, the x-rays may be an image of poor quality, making it difficult to interpret the x-rays correctly in order to perform the correct measurements. This can be frustrating at times, however I am excited to be learning a new skill such as this one. I am finding all of the information I am learning to be extremely interesting, confirming my desire to enter the field of medicine.

Below is a photo of my office-that’s right I get my OWN office! I like to think its because I’m the boss around here, but really it’s just where they had space for me.

This past weekend was very fun and relaxing. On Saturday, I picked up fellow Cornellian, Ari Penalva, at the airport. She will be working with another research team, but she will also be in Aurora for the summer. It was fun to help her move in to her apartment in Denver, and I am excited to have another friend close by. After helping her settle in, I had the chance to attend a local festival. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had fun walking around to see the different arts, crafts, and other festivities. I am looking forward to the rest of my summer here in Colorado!

Me at the festival I went to.