EPA Fellowship

Currently, I am working at my school, TAMUK, in the EPA Fellowship. It is a program that allows engineering undergrads to take part in projects surrounding air quality with graduate students during the summer. Then, at the end of the summer we take a trip to one of the various EPA locations. I am working in the Biology Department with my old roomate, who is also in the program, discovering the effects of ozone on frogs. Yesterday, I was with the grad student and we were putting the organs in wax to prepare them for slicing. I actually got to try my hand at slicing the organs into what turns out to be a ribbon of thinly sliced frog organs. We took the ribbon and put it into a water/adhesive mix. Afterwards, we took a slide and placed it under the specimen we wanted to view under the microscope and got rid of the excess, unusable samples. And the process starts all over again. The room was absolutely freezing. But today, my friend and I were putting the slides in various ethyl acohol and dye solutions to make the organs show under the microscope and get rid of the wax that was on the slide. Out of 40 slides only 8 came out right, so the grad student said to forget the ones that actually worked because we would redo them on monday. But its okay, I would rather restart this again than be sent to the rat people the grad student jokes about because they decapitate mice with a guillotine. Not very pretty I imagine, including since they told me the mice blink as their heads are being sliced off.