Quote:
Originally Posted by Quicksilvre
I did this last summer. I'm a math major, but I was working with the biology department on a human neuron growth project. My job was to write a program that tracked the growth of an axon--before this, tracking was done by hand. I felt like I was doing useful work; the doctor in charge of the research seemed to be pretty impressed with my final result.
The work was for eight hours a day, but actual work was a great deal less. I spent a few weeks in the research lab, which involved doing a lot of Western blots (i.e. some pipette work for ten minutes, followed by an hour of waiting as we centrifuged everything, followed by ten more minutes of work, then another hour of waiting...). After that I was actually working on the program, which meant switching between coding, looking up Matlab functions, and goofing off in the office I shared with five other undergrads.
It was really, really valuable, in that I got paid good money, got something great on my resume, decided that I really did want to go to grad school, and found out that lab work was definitely something I didn't want to spend my life doing. The programming wasn't that bad though.
Western blots, yuck...not all lab work is that boring