10 days later....

I finally have internet in my flat! Exciting! So, I have been at Oxford for almost 2 weeks now, and I must say I absolutely love everything about it. I guess I should start a little more from the beginning (sorry, this will be a fairly long post, as it is encompassing quite a long period of time)...

I flew in last Tuesday morning and made it safely from the airplane to a bus and to a taxi and then my flat on my own. And then I proceeded to sleep for about 15 hours. My Oxford PI (who everyone just calls by his first name, Kim) had suggested I come in on Wednesday whenever I was up and felt ready. I quickly learned that in Oxford, you walk everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to walk to work everyday, but I love it. I can either walk down the streets or through this beautiful park. Anyway, I got a little lost my first time getting to lab, but I finally made it in around 11am. I needed an ID card to be admitted in to the Experimental Psychology building, but the receptionist knew who I was...I simply said "Hi, I think I need a card..." and she was like "Ah, you must be Brittany. I'll call Natalia for you." Natalia is one of the people who works in lab (she has her Ph. D) and I did meet her when half the lab came to ATL in March. I found out that Wednesday morning was free tea and coffee for psychology people (to promote community and mingling), which was nice. I met most everyone in my lab that I hadn't previously been acquainted with and my PI came over and spoke with me for a while too. He warned me that my jetlag would be pretty bad until about my 5th day (and he was correct). I was shown my office, which I share with Natalia and Julian, and I do have my own computer, which is really nice.

Okay, so I'm rambling. Now to work stuff. In my lab they do have an ERP set-up (which I what I do at Emory), but it is quite small, and it's not what I'm really working on here. Instead, I'm working with the Preferential Looking Technique. Natalia and Nivi, the two people I'm pretty much working for, explained to me that I would shadow them a couple days, then help out for a couple weeks, and then I would take over their project with 12 month olds, which is what I'm starting now. Basically, I call moms and book the appointments, mail them all the necessary materials and then run the babies when they come in. What happens is baby sits on mom's lap and watchs 2 groups of pictures. Words are associated with the pictures and we record baby. Later on, I code for where baby's eyes are looking, such as right, left, middle, or other. That way we know which picture baby was looking at. We experiment on 12 month olds, 15, 16, 18, 24, and 30. I have run every age group excluding 30 months old. And British babies are so cute! I am still trying to get every study and every age group straight, but for 12 month olds were are just looking at whether baby will look at the picture that is audibly labeled as opposed to an unrelated picture. Additionally, I am working on a word association project that I will be able to report more on later.

Socially, we do go out to pubs and restaurants as a lab on Fridays. Also, Wednesday is movie night where we project a movie on a screen at lab and bring in dinner. More so, we do random stuff together too...two of the women and I went shopping last Saturday. But, the person closest to my age in lab is like 25/26, so there is a gap. It is difficult to meet people in college. My house has only 14 rooms and I never see anyone else around. My room is quite big, which is nice. There is only one shower in the building though, and it is 3 flights down, so I usually run down since I don't want the world to see me in my towel. I did actually meet some people tonight though, so there is hope. My mom actually arrived here yesterday, so we've been doing lots of tourist-y sight-seeing around and when we were coming back to my college area (Oxford has 39 colleges...mine is called St. Hughs), this kid practically attacked me asking if I had an hour to tango, as there was an odd number of partners. I'm a bit desperate for friends so I sent my mom back to my room for the hour that I danced. I was terrible, but the kid was really nice and we had a lot of fun. He invited me out to the pub with everyone, but I felt bad for neglecting my mom, so I told him I would come next time.

I think that's more than enough for now...that should make up for my lack of writing!