Week 8: Saying Goodbye

As my week came to an end so did a lot of the summer students. Because so many students were ending and the PI had come back from paternity leave we had a lab presentation where all the summer students presented their experiments and findings from their time there.

Having finally finished analyzing and recording all the pup calls I was assigned to do, I could graph the information and make some conclusions. Jenn was at a conference in Brazil for my last week so I was stuck trying to use the graphing program by myself. I use Graphpad prism on windows 98 which I had honestly never seen before. I had no idea what to do or how to even start and the wifi in Brazil was basically useless. But after a few frustrating hours, I was able to input the data and make some helpful graphs.  I made two each for frequency, interval duration, and motif duration (one separated by age and one covering all pup calls). I was looking for any kind of variation either between the ages or between durations. The more variation that was shown in a particular grouping of data, the more likely that type of information could be being used as a lower level feature to understand the calls.

The graphing showed that interval duration was extremely varied both across all pup calls and within ages, while the other two data points were more stereotyped. However, because interval duration (according to another paper) is also varied within adult calls and because there is a lot of overlap, this is probably not a useful feature for the maternal mice. Frequency was a bit confusing and the results were not clear, but after checking with Jenn if seems like the motif duration is the most likely feature being used for communication. The next step would be to measure the exact changing of frequency within a single motif and try new recording equipment because the kind they had was old.

On the day of the presentation I was quite nervous but after a few people had presented I felt more at ease. Once all the summer students had gone we walked to an Italian restaurant on 30th and 5th called Vago.  The waiters were very overwhelmed and kept giving me alcohol. I was able to make a lot of friends that night (other summer students, postdocs, the PI) and was very upset when I had to leave.

This was an amazing experience, in the lab, navigating New York alone, and with all the people I had met. This was a very important thing for me to do and I will never forget.