Well, these last few days I have been starting to work on tying together everything that I have been working on this summer.  Part of this is organizing everything that I need in order to put together a poster about my experience once I return to Lawrence this fall.  In addition, I will be preparing a presentation to give for the weekly lab meeting here at UNM in two weeks.  This involves organizing everything that I have done into a PowerPoint presentation and discussing how it all ties into the ‘big picture’ of the research being conducted here.  I will admit that I am a little bit nervous for this, but I also feel confident that I have learned a lot this summer and am able to articulate what I have learned and worked on.

This past weekend was fairly low-key.  On one day I drove to the top of some mountains and hiked around up there for a little while, but other than that I took it fairly easy after rolling my ankle while running on some trails Friday night.  Luckily I do not have to run as far this week, so I will have a chance to heal up as well as work on my presentation a bit.

Last week I also had the opportunity to observe as organ samples were collected from mice that had been involved in a study over the last couple months.  I was able to learn a couple different techniques used to make blood smears and later on Dr. Winter took me to the lab in the hospital where the smears are stained.  I was also able to look at these smears under a microscope and see what different cells look like (both healthy and leukemic cells).  This was a bit of hands-on learning and was very helpful in understanding what is really going on with the cells.  Today (Monday) we are collecting more organ samples and blood smears of mice and I get to try my hand at extracting organs!

Also, make sure to check out the pictures I have put up at http://samsnmpics.shutterfly.com.  There are new pictures from last week and a few more should be going up later today.  Thanks for reading!

Sam Stevens ‘13