Megan Gabruk, Entry #10, Last Week

I have had the most amazing experience over these past 10 weeks and am sad to leave the lab and Palo Alto in general. I will miss all of the great people I have met this summer, the nice weather, and Stanford’s beautiful campus. My last week in the lab has been a bittersweet one because I don’t want to leave, but everyone has made this week so special. Kate took me out for lunch on Thursday and talked to me for quite a while about past experiences and my future aspirations. Vivian, the BABIES study project coordinator, also took me out for lunch today to say goodbye. It was so great that everyone in the lab cared so much about others. I did work until the end, making sure there would be clear instructions for the next RA and that my tasks were either finished or transitioned over to someone else in the lab.

            Also, I presented on Mendeley, the reference management program, to Kate’s RAs and anyone else in the lab that wanted to know how to use it. The presentation went well and helped people either learn about the program for the first time or understand how to use more in-depth features. I hope to be able to share this program with students at Peddie because it would really help with writing research papers that have a lot of references.

The lab meeting this week consisted of talking about retention for the Early Life Stress study and recruitment for the BABIES study. Dr. Gotlib was very happy that we have already scheduled 20 participants in just a few months. It is very difficult to recruit participants and get them to take part in all of the data collection which can be up to 10 hours of time commitment. Another difficulty the BABIES study may encounter soon is that we are soon adding more stages of the study. We now want to recruit mothers at 20 weeks gestational age and follow up at them when they first have the baby, when the baby is 6 months old, when the baby is 18 months old, and when the baby is 36 months old. So, retention will soon become a major factor for the BABIES study as well.

            My other tasks this week included editing an article written by some of the lab members about irritability and researching sex differences in irritability. Also, I read a dissertation involving similar tasks to what I created and took notes to identify their findings. I sent the tasks I coded to the group that had sent us stimuli as well. They were very appreciative that we pointed out the error in the morphing faces task. Another task included making an instruction sheet for the next RA. I also helped to create figures for a paper.

            Outside of the lab, I am packing up my apartment and enjoying my last days living alone in California. I have grown up so much this summer and have learned so much. This was truly one of the best experiences of my life. I want to thank Dr. Peretz, Dr. Venanzi, Kate, Vivian, Dr. Gotlib, the other lab members, and my parents for making this amazing experience possible.