First group meeting

Today I attended my first group meeting of the lab, in which people in the group talked about their progresses on their projects . I was not expecting Dr. Eschenburg, my boss, to ask me to talk about my project though, because she just gave me the project yesterday and then she asked me to present it today. But it went fine actually. What I'm really concerned about is that I really don't know how to make a progress report. I didn't do it that much at Yale, so now it's a good chance to practice. I think I'll ask my mentor and other people in my lab tomorrow. If you have any suggestions, please let me know too.

The group meeting was actually conducted in German. I was very worried at the beginning that I wouldn't understand anything. Nonetheless, I'm familiar with most of the concepts so it was not particularly difficult to understand at the end. In addition Dr. Eschenburg was very nice and she volunteered to serve as my personal translator. My grasp German is getting better and better everyday. I think the most important thing is that I need to be very confident that I know most of the words people are speaking, because after all there are only <3000 words that German people use most of the time.

My project is going kind of slow because, 1) my PhD mentor has another undergraduate to take care of, and 2) he has his own project to do, but he himself needs help from other people too. At the end, he only got a limited amount of time for me. I was familiar with most of the techniques actually because I learned them last summer, but I was hesitate to tell him because after all I'm still not very used to the protocols at this institute.