The Rest of the Week.

Currently: Basking in the Sabbath :)

Whew. This past week was QUITE exhausting, but also very good. I'm loving St. Louis, and I'm loving WashU even more.

With the week wrapping up, I was getting into more of the "meat" of my internship this summer. I got to go over consent forms, administering the WAIS assessments, introducing subjects to the maze, etc. Also, I was able to begin research for one of the side-projects I will be working on, which Nate (graduate student) is currently trying to iron out. Basically, he's attempting to propose a study on personality, stress, aging, and regions of the brain. Yes, it's very vague at this point, which is why it's a SIDE-project. Anyway, I've been reading articles on self-esteem, the hippocampus, and personality. It's all quite fascinating. I'll probably have a little more to say about the articles once I finish the summaries (probably tomorrow).

Also, I've been learning how to use the Freesurfer software (you should Wikipedia it or something), which is basically quality control for the MRI scans we do at the Medical School. My Friday consisted of looking at the brain of a 35 year old woman for about an hour.

This week we should finally be getting some subjects in! I don't think we will be administering every aspect of our current research, just because right now the primary concern is getting the older adults through the maze (they couldn't do it effectively before, so we tweeked it a little bit). We had a few young adults come in on Friday with no trouble, so hopefully things will go well for the old folk as well :)

Everything has been kind of a whirlwind (moving, orientation, getting my bearings in a new city), but it's been really good. I'm starting to feel much more situated and I'm getting the hang of this. Though I hate adapting, I must say that I do it fairly quickly. It's crazy that we're almost halfway through June!

Prayer Requests:
- Doing good science for God's glory even while in a secular environment and figuring out exactly what that means in the first place

- Consistency in all areas of life