So, I have been in the UK for nearly 2.5 weeks now and I still love everything about it. My lab was nice enough to let me take off on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday because my mom was in the country. We went to London twice (which is nearly 2 hours away via the Tube) and it was fantastic. The weather was of the stereotypical rainy/ cold/ windy type though. I really can't believe that it is summer! We had a high of 50 degrees on Saturday. Oh, one thing I am alway confused on is the differences of measurements. They use celcius and meters and military time. I always have to spend about a minute trying to figure out what time something like 16:24 is.
Work, however, is still going very well. I am now officially running babies on my own. Natalia, the postdoc I work for, is on vacation, so I'm running babies for her as well as babies for Nivi, another postdoc, and for my own project. In addition, I am editting the sound files used in our stimuli, which took me forever today. I had to go and isolate each word and adjust the volume and label them. Also, I am calling and booking babies, which is not my favourite thing to do. It's sort of redundant since a lot of times the moms aren't home or it's a wrong number, but it has to be done. I am also scoring more babies and Natalia was teaching me how to edit the computer program for the stimuli. Also, I am doing more on this word association project. Moms were asked to think like their two year old and asked to say what word came to mind when another word was given. A study was conducted 10 years ago where they were not asked to think like their child but just themself and we will be comparing the results. It is my job currently to go through the lists and get them in order. I really feel like I am accomplishing something here, which is great. There are still some tasks that I would rather not do - my PI asked me to reorganise his book shelves so they are alphabetical and categorical. And he has like a million books! However, he did tell me my primary job is to do research, which is nice.
I am surprised though, at how much work there really is to do. My lab at Emory is considerably smaller, so there weren't as many studies going on. I worked from 9-6 today and I should have stayed longer, but I was just really tired...when I left pretty much all of the 8 researchers (post-docs/grad students/etc) were still there. I always have lists of things to do and I never can finish everything. I even work when I get home quite often and I know I will have to probably either go in or work at home this weekend.
Socially, my lab is still my major outlet. The psych department had drinks at this nice place called the University Club, which is next to our Experimental Psychology building. However, each lab pretty much stayed to themselves and we went to dinner afterwards. I really like everyone a lot - we are planning to go see Pirates, play pool, and have a movie night at lab, all next week. They are also trying to plan real trips, like to Switzerland, but I don't know if I'll still be around. Even though they are older, I really feel comfortable and I completely fit in. And, thanks to my mom, I now know my next door neighbor. He's really nice and from Italy and he came to visit this evening. Apparently he had been wondering what I was doing in this building, as they are all grad students/professors...he had said that I look so young. Tonight he told me he thought I was 17. I told him he gave me more credit then some people - I've gotten 16 more than once. But that sums up my social life - even if I did meet more people, all the undergrads leave in a couple weeks.
This is seriously one of the best experience of my life. I was talking to another person over drinks yesterday and was telling him that I want to apply here and he directed me to quite a few people in the speciality that I want (which is not the Babylab, even though I love it) But, this is pretty long so until next time!
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