Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Research Talks-Day 2

I gave my research talk today, and I think it went reasonably well. I did not go over time, so there's one tangible measurement of my improvement since my journal club talk. On the other hand, I don't think that I answered some of the audience's questions as well as I could have. My preceptor and some of my labmates came to see my talk, which was really nice of them.

In the afternoon, I worked on all of the evaluations we have to write for the end of the block. One is for the block in general; one is for my PSS tutor; and one is for my research preceptor. For the tutor and preceptor evals, we were asked to comment on the person's strengths and weaknesses. There were just basically those two boxes and a list of points we were asked to discuss, and that was the entire eval. The end of block eval covers every class we took during the entire summer block, and it had a ton of multiple choice questions asking about our experiences in each class we were taking, followed by some boxes where we could write in comments and suggestions.

After I finished those, I went through the histology slides that we were assigned to review for Thursday. We don't have an actual class-Thursday is just an orientation day. But I think the pathology prof just wants us to start familiarizing ourselves with the book and with the way the different cell types look. The assignment was open book, which helped because I had to look up what all the cell types were. After about an hour and a half of doing this, I have discovered that nearly all cells look alike. I mean, they all have a nucleus and some cytoplasm and a membrane. The only ones that are easy to distinguish are the adipocytes (fat cells) because they just look fatty, the skeletal muscle cells because of their sarcomeres, and the epithelial cells that have cilia on them. One of my classmates who already took path and histo said that eventually you can start to tell them apart after enough practice. I hope so!

1 comment:

Sara said...

I promise that eventually you can tell the cell types apart. :)

- your favorite pathologist