Week 8: Polishing Projects and Expanding Perspectives

Hey everyone, welcome back! This week I balanced final design work with deep literature integration and an inspiring campus visit. Here’s how it went down.

I spent the first half of the week perfecting every detail of the immunostaining figures for my symposium poster. In Illustrator, I fine-tuned the fluorescence overlays, rebalancing the Sox2, Ki67, GFAP, and DAPI channels for maximum clarity, added vector-precision scale bars and zone labels, and aligned all panels using guides to ensure a polished, publication-worthy layout. Adjusting color curves and exporting as a high-resolution PDF ensures that the final print will faithfully represent the intricate cellular patterns we’ve documented.

Alongside the visuals, I conducted a meta-analysis of published studies on prenatal marijuana and opioid exposure to contextualize our Bay Area data. By extracting effect sizes, gestational age ranges, and demographic information, I was able to compare our findings, particularly the altered Sox2/Ki67 distributions, with broader trends in the literature. I then added these insights into a PowerPoint narrative that begins with the 19 percent prenatal marijuana use rate in the Bay Area, describes our tissue-section immunostaining and IMARIS 3D analyses, highlights my quantitative contributions, and closes with the public health implications of our work.

To cap off the week, I visited Case Western Reserve University’s campus in Cleveland and was immediately struck by its welcoming atmosphere. Strolling through the residence halls, I saw how thoughtfully designed the living spaces are, with comfortable common rooms and study nooks that make balancing academics and social life effortless. Sampling local favorites in the nearby Uptown district, from cozy coffee shops to eclectic eateries, gave me a taste of the vibrant student dining scene. Conversations with current undergraduates about their favorite campus traditions, club activities, and the wealth of research opportunities taught me that CWRU offers not only top-tier academics but also a tight-knit community where I could grow both personally and intellectually.

And that’s about all for this week everyone, thank you for tuning in!