the adsense from this video will be donated to the trevor project. unfortunately, i missed pride
month in june and june was the month i originally planned for the trevor project's next charity
video to be, but honestly every month can be pride month. just because june ended doesn't mean that
all queer people disappear at the end of the month! anyhow, the trevor project is a national
organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to young lgbtq people.
the trevor project's website also has helpful resources located in the trevor support center and
there are a variety of resources related to coming out, help related to religious issues, mental
health, self injury, and sexual health. i'll leave the links to the trevor project's website down
below as well as a link to the support center if you're interested in checking them out.
if you have some spare money, i would highly suggest you donate to them but if you don't,
then feel free to keep watching with adblock off so that your view still contributes. adsense
still works even if you skip the ad so don't feel obligated to watch the entire thing. thank you so
much! hello! it's seo from tbhstudying and good lord, i have taken my habit of late journal plan
with me videos a little too far. if you watched my last video, this is the video i lost my files for
and in the end, i couldn't recover them so i just refilmed and re-edited everything so here's the
video! i've been very very busy for the past few months so i haven't been able to make plan with
me videos as often as i would like so instead, i have a little flipthrough video to make up
for the lack of plan with me videos. i also know that i made a resolution to donate to charities
via the income from the plan with me videos that i made, so i took the adsense i received from the
past three months, divided them by three for the three months i didn't make plan with me videos,
and donated each portion to the loveland foundation, campaign zero, and color of change.
i'll leave links to the three different charities in the description below if you're interested
in learning more about them and i highly recommend them. so that's april, may, and june
and this video was meant to count for july but since i couldn't get around to filming it soon
enough and basically fixing all the problems that i had with it, the last video i did, the one where
i talk about my frustrations with academia, that will be my charity video for july and this will
be my charity video for august. i'm not sure if i'll have enough time at the end of august since
currently my august is very busy as well so i'll figure out a substitute video that can serve as
my charity video for september. let me know down in the comments below if there's a specific idea
or charity that you'd like me to pick for that video. otherwise, how have you guys been doing?
i'm currently working in a neurotoxicology lab on campus right now, and surprisingly,
a lot of people were curious about the work i do in the lab based on the instagram DMs i got so
here's the rundown! i was originally working on a project about GABA receptors. GABA receptors are
widely distributed in the central nervous system and it's a major molecular target for a lot of
drugs like benzodiazepines and anesthetics. okay, i don't know if i'm pronouncing benzodiazepine
right but to clarify, they're a a category of drug that are used to treat symptoms like anxiety by
enhancing the effects of GABA and a lot of common benzodiazepines that are prescribed are drugs like
klonopin (clonazepam), valium (diazepam), and xanax (alprazolam). the specific work
i was originally doing in lab was working on a mechanistic study on the model system that we're
doing in lab, which is specifically planarians, a kind of flatworm that is just really really good
at regenerating their cells. some people asked me if i work with zebrafish after i posted some
photos on my instagram story but no, i just work with planarians. they're just these tiny worms.
i used to work with zebrafish during high school though! for the mechanistic study,
i did a lot of molecular biology work such as amplifying genes, cloning, mini-prepping plasmids,
all that work, and i was really bogged down in the PCR step. PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction
and essentially, it's a way to make a ton of copies of a specific sample of DNA that you want.
the problem is that no one has characterized the specific sequence of DNA that i was working on,
which is the GABA-A receptor for planarians, and i had some issues using the right primers,
using the right annealing temperatures, and using the right amount of cDNA for PCR.
at some point, i was going to start behavioral screening which involves exposing the worms to a
variety of toxins that target the GABA receptors, recording their behavior, and determining lethal
concentrations of the different drugs for the worms. however, i've been transferred over to a
different project which looks at characterizing an enzyme that helps with organophosphate metabolism
and organophosphates are commonly found in pesticides and they can be super toxic for
you if you inhale them, ingest them, or if you get them on your skin. for this project,
i'm mainly working on RNAi, which is short for RNA interference. in this method, you use small,
double-stranded pieces of RNA to specifically target a gene sequence and suppress it.
i hope that wasn't bogged down with too much jargon or too much detail so please feel
free to ask any clarifying questions in the comments and i'll do my best to answer them.
schedule-wise, my lab professor is chill with time shifts so i can come in when i need to and
leave when i'm done with work. for some days, that means i get work done within three or four hours
and on other days, i'm at the lab for 10 to 12 hours. i come in on weekends sometimes to
complete time-sensitive work. specifically, the RNAi experiments are time-sensitive in
that i have to individually inject each planarian with double-stranded RNA for four days straight
and then i have to decapitate them on the fifth day so that they can sufficiently regenerate with
the gene knockdown present in their heads after 12 days. it's a whole procedure, don't worry,
the worms are fine. the worms can regenerate and they heal themselves really well, and they're
also asexual worms. well, specifically, the kind of worm that i'm working on is asexual
and they reproduce by regenerating themselves so they're okay, it's just time-sensitive. i'm not
super sure on what the work is like compared to other labs since i've worked in the same lab ever
since i came to swarthmore, but based on other labs, i think my lab is unique in that we cover
a wide range of topics, we have a lot of projects going on, and we also have a lot of people in lab.
my professor also works on biophysics projects and developmental biology on top of neurotoxicology,
and it makes sense because she's the systems biology professor which has a lot of
interdisciplinary work between the STEM subjects. i mean, we have CS majors and physics majors in
our lab as well as neuroscience and biology majors. i think right now, we have 12 people
actively working in lab whereas other biology labs in my department tend to have to have four
to seven people and seven seems to be the maximum for other labs, so 12 is a lot and we have a lot
of other people working remotely, so i think right now, our slack channel has 22 people in it, so
it's a lot of people! and honestly, working in lab is the main reason why i haven't had as much time
to make videos. i'm in lab almost every day and any free time i get, i spend it studying for the
MCAT and cooking for myself since we don't have a substantial meal plan over the summer. i can't
really film at night with satisfactory lighting because i don't have studio lights and honestly,
i don't really want to have studio lights at college since i can't store them anywhere.
i also prefer filming in natural light because i think it gives a more accurate color readoff on
screen which i prefer, especially if i'm filming something like stationery swatches or showing
my bullet journal spreads. i just want them to be as accurate on screen as i see them in real life.
i wish i had more time to make videos but honestly, that's more on me than anything else.
i should be better at managing my time and my schedule so that i can accommodate making videos.
i think i might start doing biweekly videos instead of trying to get a video out every
single week. that way, there's some semblance of a schedule that you guys can rely on. anyways,
back to lab stuff, right now, i just wrapped up my series of interference experiments and i'm working
on imaging in situ hybridization results for other people in my lab. in situ is latin for "in the
natural place" and it's a kind of experiment where you can look at a specific gene or protein in the
organism without removing it from the tissue. you don't have to slice it out or anything like that,
and we specifically use a probe to detect what we wanna find, and that probe is usually a copy of
the sequence that you want to look at. in situs are great for identifying specific sequences of
interest directly in the tissue or organism that you're using, which can provide a lot
of physiological insights. however, the whole procedure is kinda long and tricky and super
finicky and if you don't optimize it correctly, you can really screw it up and not gain much from
it. it also doesn't give you any quantitative results, so you're gonna want to default to
some sort of assay or measuring system to back up the qualitative data you get from in situs.
i actually enjoy in situ experiments a lot. they were the first thing i learned how to do in a lab,
which i learned during my high school internship at a molecular biology lab, and although they can
be time-consuming and delicate, i think the end result is really beautiful, especially if you get
a great image of it. it's all pretty and purple and you can see exactly where the expression is.
i also think the abbreviations for the protocols are kinda cute. there's the FISH protocol which
stands for fluorescent in situ hybridization and the WISH protocol which stands for whole-mount
in situ hybridization. i've mainly been using the WISH protocol and right now, i'm working
on optimizing the fixation step which is the step where you kill the worm that you're looking at and
that sounds pretty gruesome, but basically, the problem that i've been running into is that the
worms kinda throw up their stomachs after i kill them which makes it really inconvenient to run
the rest of the in situ protocol on them because they get so much more delicate. sometimes, it'll
mess up the imaging, sometimes the probe won't go in and accurately get in and stain the way
you want it to, but yeah, i've just been trying to figure out how to get the worms to stop throwing
up their stomachs on me, so that's what i've been working on for the last few weeks of my research.
wow, i just feel like this entire video is just me info-dumping science on you. well,
congratulations, now you know some of what i've been up to. i don't really have much to
say about the whole journaling bit which is the bit you guys are actually looking at and if i'm
being honest with you, i actually haven't been using my bullet journal very often.
there are a couple reasons for that. first, the notebook i'm using right now is kinda chunky
because the number of pages it has and because of the quality and thickness of the paper,
which is a great thing, don't get me wrong, it has great quality paper. it's nice and thick and i
rarely get bleedthrough with it but it just makes it thicker than the average notebook and it's
just inconvenient for me to lug around sometimes. i also don't bring my bullet journal with me to
lab because i don't wanna accidentally contaminate it with something suspicious from the lab,
and because i work in a neurotoxicology lab, there's a lot of suspicious stuff just floating
around in our lab and also, because i work all the time, i don't really have as much time as i
used to to freely write journal entries aside from the things i have to do. occasionally, when i have
spare time and i want to decompress, i'll journal and fiddle around with decorations but for now,
i just haven't been using it very often. i've been debating on whether i want to transition to
a premade planner of some kind, but then i would miss doing monthly set ups with you guys and i've
grown too used to the freeform style of planning that i do now and i don't know how well that would
mesh with the planner. either way, i'll keep you guys posted on that and for now, that's all i've
got. again, if you're interesed in the trevor project, the loveland foundation, campaign zero,
or color of change, i will leave the links down in the description box below. thank you so much for
taking a little time out of your day to watch and hopefully i will see you in the next video. bye!