Megan Gabruk, Entry #1, The First Week

When I arrived at the Gotlib lab at Stanford University, I met with my postdoc Kate Humphreys right away. She took me out for coffee and we discussed what I would be doing this week. Because I am not 18, I cannot work with the infants and mothers personally, but she has plenty of other work for me to do. Part of my work includes recruitment for the BABIES project which is part of what I wrote my proposal on. It was nice that I already knew about the project, so I knew who I was targeting for recruitment. I cannot talk too much about what the BABIES project is about because it is still piloting and the subjects cannot know exactly what the study is on in order to keep them unbiased.

To recruit participants, I had to hang flyers where new mothers would most likely be, and I had to order brochures. Along with recruitment I have to find funding opportunities. My postdoc explained how necessary it was to get grants because of how expensive each scanning session is for the BABIES project. She also explained how difficult it was to become a professor, saying that only 8% of postdocs would ever be a tenured professor. My other work includes editing the grants and citing them with this great program Kate introduced me to called Mendeley which saves all the websites needed for the grants’ references sections.

This is the flyer I had to put up for recruitment purposes.

The people in my lab are super nice and inclusive. Dr. Gotlib is a very distinguished professor in the world of psychology and seems very down to earth when I have talked to him. Kate has already taught me a lot and has let me work on important tasks which I appreciate. So far, there have only been 5 research assistants that are consistently there, but there will be many more coming because my lab is pretty big and has lots of work for the RA’s to do. The RA’s I have met so far are really easy to talk to and are all undergrads. They are in charge of cleaning up images of the brain in order to be prepared for analysis.

I have to attend 4 meetings per week. The first meeting is just between Kate and me to discuss what I will be working on each week. The second one is with all of the other research assistants in which different lab members present at each week. The third one is a profession development meeting with just Kate’s research assistants when we discuss different topics including how to write a good CV, abstract, and grant as well as how to ask a good research question. The fourth meeting is a whole lab meeting in which Dr. Gotlib presents on an interesting topic unless he is not there. For example, this week Kate led the meeting and we discussed what our elevator speech would be when explaining what our role is in the lab. All of these meetings are super helpful and make me enjoy the experience even more.

Living on my own in an apartment has been a pretty good experience so far. I only live about a mile away from where I work, so I walk or bike there each day. I have access to a lot of resources including a grocery store only a mile away and downtown Palo Alto only 2 miles away. Also, there is a train into San Francisco that is only 2 miles away. I have not encountered any major problems yet and look forward to spending 9 more weeks here.