Working in Professoressa Baroli’s lab for the past three days has been interesting so far. The walk from my apartment to the lab is at least an adventure. The lab is situated on top of a hill next to the Castello district that overlooks the entire city, while my apartment on Via Sassari is pretty much at sea level. This hill can be as steep as those in San Francisco. I would have to walk about ten to fifteen minutes to get to the lab every morning, and during that time my legs are certainly getting a good workout! I forgot to mention that I will probably get hit by a car at least once by the end of this summer. Many major intersections lack traffic signals or signs, so you would have to start walking through a street and hope that cars will see and stop for you. There have been many instances when I almost got hit by a distracted driver or by those darn vespas that whiz past you while you’re walking on Cagliari’s narrow sidewalks.
Once you get to the lab, I try to greet Professoressa Baroli in her office before I go into the lab, which is next to her office. Professoressa Baroli is extremely nice and way too elegant to be a PI. For instance, while I was finishing up some administrative paperwork with her this morning, I noticed how nicely she dressed: nice light blue Chanel blouse with her Chanel reading glasses, YSL sunglasses delicately perched on top of her head, and gigantic sapphire ring that glistened from the sun. Not only is she very elegant, but she is very personable. Every phone call she receives or visitors she meets, she carries out fairly lengthy conversations that are full of laughter as well as business. Professoressa Baroli is definitely someone I had imagined when I think about Italian women. Signs of a researcher can also be seen. She wears the mandatory jeans and close toed shoes, and less noticeable, she is very meticulous, direct, and organized which is the personality I’m normally used to seeing from all my biology professors.
After I greet her, I go into the lab and help Carla or Marianna with whatever they need to get done for the day. Carla speaks better English than Marianna, but both are very nice and try do a great job of explaining what they are doing or making casual conversation. We tentatively set up a system where they would speak to me in English and I would speak to them in Italian, so that we can both learn and become better at speaking each other’s languages. There’s actually more down time than I expected; the Italians really do work slower! But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The people who I encountered with so far really take the time to understand everything that surround the experiment, and are very meticulous with everything…almost a little too meticulous. For instance, we spent the whole day today taking nearly perfect electron microscopy images of nanoparticles. I am so used to having to run, on average, 3 different experiments on a given day for my UROP that sometimes I lose track of what I’ve done or make silly mistakes during an experiment. Then again, I guess it’s a question about efficiency: on one hand, you work slower and will probably produce fewer results over a certain time period compared to someone working faster. On the flip side, the chances of you making unnecessary, maybe time-consuming mistakes are lower when you work slower than when you work faster. This sounds like a 14.01 problem….Anyways, for now, I’m still running on an MIT schedule, so working this slow is slightly discomforting (sadly), but by the end of the summer I will probably welcome the slower pace. The question could also apply to the pace in which we go through life. For me, I guess I never really bothered to stop and smell the roses. I should definitely try it during senior year. That’s it for now- more to come later!
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