Home is where the Heart is

We took a company photo today! I really enjoyed my work at Acumen. Dr Ong had been really nice and teaching us lots of new things.

Exams was over more than a week ago. I have been enjoying myself since then. Internship officially starts on Monday. No more playing around. Need to wake up early every morning, even earlier than I need to go for lesson. But I guess this new job will be exciting. The company offers contract R&D services to support early-stage drug target discovery and pre-clinical drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, with focus on anti-cancer therapy.

I went back to lab today to finish the unfinished:P I totally overestimate myself. I thought I would be able to complete everything by 12pm but I was not even halfway done. So in the end, I stayed till 4pm (NOW!)

Today's lab was rather messy. I forgotten all the protocol so had to read my logbook again. Luckily I still manage to figure out what I need to do :P

As a result, I didn't manage to join the rest for the belated birthday celebration. Sorry!

I'm still contemplating whether to go lab tomorrow. Schedule is rather tight. Still have a lot more to study for mid-terms. Plus, I want to go out and enjoy one of these days!

My internship is officially over! Yay...We had lunch together at Earle Swensen's. Throughout these 3 months, I have really learned a lot of new things. It's truly an enjoyable experience although there are days where I just sit in the lab and not doing anything. But...that's not the end, I will still go back during the semester to continue on my project. Hopefully I can complete the project as soon as possible:)

With A/Prof Laszlo Orban, our supervisor at the lab
Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory

This is the car the family owns. Looks so cute!!!
Tiger! I haven't seen the bottle of thing he holding before.
'Haw' the tiger! It's located at most of the entrances

'Par' the leopard. It's one pair:P

Many many more photos that we took. No time to upload all:P hehe..they are in facebook:) After almost 4 hours visit, we went to VivoCity to have our dinner at Terra Cafe:P Just opposite Swensen's.

I'm trying to finish 2 days work in one day and now I ended up having to work over time :S Haha..but nevermind la..I look forward to a slack day tomorrow considering that I won't have much to do (hopefully). I'm currently doing 2 experiments at the same time. There are very similar to the extent that I got them mixed up sometimes.

I'm sorry for all the trouble and misunderstanding. Hope to get over them soon.

Our whole lab went for dinner together at Fusionopolis as a farewell for the Honours Students. It's the first time that we are all having a meal together..hehe..we don't usually eat lunch with our prof.

I ordered a cheese baked rice with creamy mango as the sauce and sausage, salmon and chicken as the fillings. Oh, we had free creamy corn soup too..the person brought it to us and told us it's on the house. Haha..so nice. We also have Ice Lemon Tea and Chocolate Chip Mint Ice Cream as dessert for taking the Student's Meal. So it's quite worth it considering that we were super full that we are lazy to walk after eating. Haha..my mentor's recommendation not bad :)

After eating, we decided to take group photos. Took one at the front of the escalator. They have quite a nice roof-like structure. And we also took another one as we are coming down from the escalator. I think that one was quite cool. Everyone was lining up to go down the escalator. The effect nice.

It was really a fun day-out together. And we saw an injured pigeon on the way back. Tried to help it but it was quite terrified. In the end, it flew across the road.

Hmm...but I did something quite silly and I regret doing. Luckily I'm forgiven (I think) :)

We had our 'lab excursion' to St. John's Island. I was quite excited about it coz I haven't been there before but our professor told us that there's not food there so we need to pack our own lunch :S

We met at our supervisor's condo at 7.15am before taking a cab to Marina South Pier to board the boat. The journey was slightly less than an hour on the boat. We arrived at St. John's Island at approximately 9am, exchanged for our pass and starts working :P

Some of the fishes are really huge weighing more than 7kg. I was scared by one of the fish while we are trying to get samples from it suddenly it's awake and jump! Arr...so scary lor..lucky I manage to run fast enough and my prof took care of it after that. We took the samples we needed and they cleaned the fish to bring them home for dinner. They said it taste good.

It's not really fun to be working. I think I like being a student more. It's so much more fun and relaxing. I'm already one week into internship! Yippee! My mentor will teach me some new stuff tomorrow. I'm going to learn how to cut the electrophoresis gel and extract the DNA from it. I will also do cloning and sequencing. So excited...but it's quite tiring to go to work also. So little time left to sleep:(

Went for a meeting on standing committee updates with Yee Han, Feng Fu and E Yin (I think). Haha..cant remember her name. But it was just a short meeting. There's another one on 5th of June. So I foresee myself being very busy this holiday.

One week of internship is over and I'm moving on to the second week. I finally got started with my project. Quite excited about it although its a lot of repetitive work. I will have to troubleshoot many many times before getting the appropriate settings and combinations.

And we are also moving out from NUSSU Secretariat so last Thursday, we were there to pack up our things and clear the room. Found quite a lot of antiques in the room. Haha..I'm also supposed to move out from my room today but the management didn't record which room I'm supposed to move to and so the security guard who are there for the 24 hours check out don't know which is my allocated room. So I can't move yet!!! Argh, so frustrating...this is the only weekend left to shift so that means I will have to move them during the weekdays after work..the thought of it is tiring enough :S

We had our RA Training yesterday where I get to meet a lot of new friends. We had lots of fun playing the games and getting to know one another. The senior RAs were there to share their experience too. And I guess after our training, we are more geared up for the coming semester :P We also decided to have BBQ for the outgoing RAs some time in June and we had our first R3 meeting last night to plan for the upcoming activites. Today, our professors will be treating us to a restaurant to celebrate the end of another semester. Haha..I'm there to eat since I wasn't part of the team last semester :)

It's already my second day of internship at TLL. I haven't been doing much these two days.
Day 1
We met Yang Hong at about 9.30am to settle the administrative stuff and she brought us to our lab to meet with A/Prof Laszlo, our supervisor. My mentor's Hsiao Yuen. She's really nice and friendly. She brought us down to the store to collect some stationeries and also our lab coat. Then she showed us around the lab and brief us a bit on the safety rules and the position of equipments. After that, it's just sitting down at my table reading journals and thesis. But Hsiao Yuen asked me if I'm interested to see her doing transformation so I went to the lab with her:P I got to learn a bit about the equipment to use and some techniques to ensure measures are taken to minimised errors.

Day 2
It's super boring. My mentor went to Qian Hu to collect some samples so she was not in the whole morning. Therefore, there's nothing for me to do. She was quite busy after coming back so no time to really teach me. We went for a 2 hours lunch and seminar at the auditorium. I was super sleepy. Nearly fall asleep in the auditorium but because we were sitting at the first row right in front of the speaker, have to pretend I'm paying full attention and fight my sleepiness. So torturing to sit in for one hour and feeling sleepy plus the auditorium's like quite nice to sleep.

Look forward for tomorrow. I'll have to wait for Qifeng to pass me his thesis to read:P I hope there's something for me to do. Don't like sitting in the lab and staring the the flap catching flies:S