Between 1st and 2nd year I arranged a placement in a local QC lab and loved it. It was laid back, people were friendly, small and well equipped. Wages were good and it was so close to my mums house I got to work in 3mins. It seems I musta made a good impression because a few weeks ago the lab manager text me and offered me a permanent position.
I was a bit blown away as I had planned to do my MSc in septemer but the salary was that of a post-MSc job. That coupled with the same people working in the lab made for an interesting offer and to be honest I'd have been a fool not to take it.
Here I am, first week ina goo little job where skills such as thoroughness, having a maticulous nature and cleanliness are way above looking good (sexeh lab coat!) an being overly social. It's suh a nice place, there's no pressure to make small talk but the 4 of us in the lab get on well and have similar sense of humour. Tbh I love it. It's such a contrast to my old job.
Thought I'd share some of the things that I do at the moment. I'm mostly doin the things I did 4yrs ago while I wait for my boss to get trained in the new experiments and pass the knowledge on to me :)
These are the bottles that hold broth media. I mix the media, put it into bottles, sterilise them in the autoclave machine and then perform experiments using them. Basically I dissolve the substance I'm testing into the particular broth, incubate it for 24, 48 hours and then read the results. I'm looking for cloudiness particularly. I then take a sample from every bottle and plate it onto three types of solid agar which promotes bacterial growth and therefore I can tell what's growing in what samples
This is a fridge of mixed solid agars. The plates have samples drizzled onto them using a sterile inoculating loop. There are also test tubes filled with currently solid agar but I melt these and add them to samples to encourage growth, then incubate them at different temperatures.
It's a big fridge, this is one of 5 we have :)
More broth media, including some suspension fluids (like the clear ones)
The daddy - the autoclave machine which heats it's contents to 121degrees Celsius and kills off anything that will contaminate the sample!
Here are my favourite plates. It's got 3 compartments which are filled with different agars, basically it's easier to read and quicker to plate out. Pretty isn't it!
More updates to come! xx
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