It was the last day, and I'll keep this short before I start crying.
Let's stick to the facts to keep these tears in check. I brought the cookie-brownie bars I made last night at 11pm to the lab meeting (I didn't forget this time after the chocolate chip cookie incident!) and Danielle was presenting a paper going through revision by another lab who does extremely similar things to what we're working on. Danielle prefaced her presentation with a quick walkthrough of what our lab is researching on, mainly for the sake of Nick, who is new and thus the only person who doesn't know about our lab's research. As she walked through the background, I realized how far I have come because I followed everything she said, simply because I had already knew it, after reading many papers. As she launched into her presentation, which was highly technical and dug deep into the core of our research, I was pleased in my ability to follow her talk as well as the discussion and questions that bounced around. My first week here, Danielle was presenting her research and since she had provided no background, I was so lost. Things have come full circle, with Danielle being the first and last lab meeting presenter I've listened to, and I'm ridiculously happy to look on how far I've come.
Today was mainly finishing up my lab notebook, since there was no experiments for me to do. I grabbed an early lunch with Christina, Deborah had also went to get lunch then, and it was a pleasant way to spend the last day, lunch with all the remaining interns. We also met a person from the lab next to ours, hi Mike, and it's pretty funny, at least for me, that I'm still meeting people on my last day. Speaking of meeting people, as I was walking up the Medical Center metro escalator, an Asian kid comes up to me and asks if the tennis racket I was carrying was a badminton one. I told him no, but it's funny that so many things happen on my last day, and if I didn't know that today was August 7, it would feel like any other day of my internship.
Deborah and I had to go to an awards ceremony for our research program (NIH-SIP-NINDS) and we saw the top three presenters from poster day yesterday, which was a really good experience both to learn about their topics, but also to learn what other people have been doing in the same institute at me (all of NINDS was in the afternoon session, and since I was "required" to stay at my poster, I couldn't go around and look at more posters during the afternoon session). There was a reception afterwards with food, and I also met Jennifer, who I had met during the NIH-SIP Career Symposium, which was coincidentally another full-circle moment.
I talked to Gailyn for the first time, even though she was in Mike's lab and I had seen her around. I can't believe 9 weeks has passed and I've only officially met her today! She was so sweet and gave me thank you cards for me to write notes to Richard and my mentor.
Before leaving, I placed my lab notebook on my mentor's desk and I gave everyone a hug. Well, all the girls because Jon had left earlier (I bid my goodbyes, no worries) and I already had one last talk with Nick, who jokingly told me to consider his alma mater, Villanova this fall while I'm applying for college.
I turned my badge to Katie, my office manager for the summer, slipping it under her door since she had left the office already, and then I walked out of Building 35, taking the route that my mentor and I have always taken when leaving work together, one last time.
I got home before 6pm, something that has never happened this whole summer, and a part of me feels empty, even now because I feel like I should be busy; I feel like I should be reading papers for journal club next Monday or looking up more information on mitophagy and the proteins involved in this quality control mechanism, but journal club has ended and my summer at NIH is over. Sure, some weeks dragged by when my experiments weren't working and I found myself working late hours, but these 9 weeks flew by, full of amazing lab mates and other fellow interns, disobedient bacteria, mischievous cell lines, and one incredibly knowledgeable, amazing mentor. It was truly a wonderful experience, and with that, my story in one city comes to a close.
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