Busy in Berkeley: Just the Beginning

Hi everyone!

I left St. Louis for Berkeley on Sunday morning and it has been crazy so far! Finding time to update this blog is very difficult because our schedules are so full every single day, but I still want to share what I've experienced.

First of all, everyone in my program is really, really nice, which is great because Kirkwood and Mizzou are super cliquey. The other Amgen Scholars are from all over the country- Florida, New York, Indiana, New Mexico, Washington, and even Puerto Rico. To add to the diversity, every person is researching something completely different; some people are in chemical engineering, others work in health-related fields, and some are in biology. Even though everyone is so different, we all share a common interest in scientific research and graduate school and most of us have never been to San Francisco or Berkeley before, so all of us are completely lost.

We participated in campus tours and orientations at the beginning of the week and on Wednesday we started working in our labs full time. I’m researching in a yeast genomics lab, so a lot of the techniques and ideas are unfamiliar to me because I work in an ecological and conservation genetics laboratory at Mizzou. My faculty mentor is very helpful and nice, but also expects me to learn and understand everything quickly, which I appreciate. It seems like some people rarely see their PI’s (Principal Investigators), while others work directly with them everyday. I’m more in the middle; I usually start my day by discussing my research project with my mentor, then either work alone or with a graduate student when I need assistance. What I’ve learned so far is that I really hate having nothing to do and just sitting around and prefer having many tasks to complete. I like researching in a challenging environment and also enjoy working independently, and as the program continues I’m sure I’ll learn more about myself and my interests that will help me decide what I want to do after I graduate.

Aside from just researching, we also have to talk about our research with other people multiple times a week to prepare us for the symposium in Los Angeles and our presentations at the end of the summer. It’s pretty difficult to explain in detail a new project that I don’t have much background on, but I know I’ll get better as the summer continues.

The Berkeley campus is huge and so gorgeous; every building has a different kind of architecture, there aren’t any roads running through the campus so people don’t get hit by cars every day like at Mizzou, there are giant trees sporadically dispersed around the buildings, and some of the buildings are just mammoth in size. It’s also cool knowing that so many protests have occurred here. The best thing is that Berkeley is a top research institution, especially in my prospective biology field, in which they’re ranked number one, so I’m so fortunate that I get to research at one of the best places in the country for the summer.

While the campus is pretty, the city of Berkeley is a different story. The people here are even crazier than I could of imagined! There are so many crazy people here that a lot of doors are always locked so people can’t break in and steal things, and you can’t even have a bike here because people cut the locks off of them and steal them. There are many people living on the streets, which is sad, but a lot of them just yell at you when you walk by and so it’s kind of scary to go anywhere after dark. For instance, I was walking to Walgreens one night, which, by the way, is one of the only chain stores here, and a crazy guy started talking to me and decided to kiss me on both cheeks “like French people do” while saying that I need to find his sister and protect her while she’s away at school. Hmm... Interestingly enough, five minutes later when I walked by again he had already forgotten me! Most of these people live around Telegraph Avenue, which is like a hippie/homeless person/pothead hangout, so I don’t really venture there too much.

Ignoring the scary places, the actual landscape is really pretty! There are mountains to my East, and from the top floors of my building I can see more mountains to the West and a view of San Francisco and the Bay. I’m really excited to go to the big city, which we are tomorrow morning. We’re taking the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) over to San Francisco from Berkeley and then we’re taking a walking tour of some of the more famous places. I’ll update after tomorrow and hopefully have some exciting stories! In the meantime, here are some pictures that I took this week: