I know I didn’t tell you guys much about my internship yet, but that’s because I wanted to wait a bit and write a bigger fragment about it (instead of little pieces every time). So here we go!
In the office where I work we have Jérôme, Laurent and Aurore (who work here as permanent employees). Marine and Laura are two other interns who work at the same office as I do. Everybody is really friendly and helpful. But not everyone speaks English very well, what sometimes leads to weird, funny or confusing conversations. On the other hand, working here with some people who don’t speaks English that well, really improved my French a lot (but it’s still far from perfect…). My research is about an aberrant form of an antibody that may play a role in Henoch Schönlein Purpura. I’m helping with the optimization of our protocol to detect these aberrant antibodies. My thesis tutor is Jérôme, he’s in charge of this research. At this moment, we are working with standards of a company (so no real patient samples), but as soon as we get the perfect protocol to detect the antibodies, we can start experimenting on the real samples (maybe next week already!!). The only downside it that I have a lot of time I have to incubate my standards/samples, so I have to wait a lot. Luckily, I can follow Marine or Laura if they are doing some experiments (and of course talk a bit). Marine is working on a new biomarker to detect Alzheimer and Laure does research on identification of the TAU protein in cerebrospinal fluid.
The lab itself is very nice. It’s so clean and a lot of new and proper devices. Most of the times, I work in the little lab (upstairs), but the machine I use (combination of a nano liquid chromatography and a high resolution mass spectrometry) are in a different room. This room is downstairs, together with the other mass spectrometry devices (so we call is the mass spec room). These devices are all used by the people in our office (there was a problem with one of the machines last week, so Jérôme had to open it, it was very cool to see it on the inside). Another nice machine I use to clean my samples, is the Bravo Asseymap. It almost works fully automatic and it’s so fascinating to look at (my opinion as a lab technician :p). I made a video of how this machine is working, but it stops a bit abrupt (I was to close and triggered the sensor, so it shut down immediately, clumpsy me…).
Marine is a really great help in here. She helped me a lot with the paperwork for getting my entry card. I needed a lot of signatures and short courses to get my card. Not everyone spoke English so she always came with me to translate if I didn’t understand something. She also helped me with writing my CV in French (because I really needed the help with this one). But now I have a good CV that I can use in the future too. My other colleagues are very helpful too, especially with teaching my some French. My two last short courses in the lab went so good that Marine didn’t even have to translate!
(Btw, I finally got my own enrty card after working here for five weeks! :))
When we have the time (what happens regularly), we take a coffee break and talk a bit. We also don’t really have fixed hours. If you want to start/stop a bit earlier or later, you can do what you want. As long as you get your work done, they don’t say anything about it. This is really nice and confirms the typical French mentality in the South: à l’aise.
