Day in the Life: 3rd-Year Neurobiology PhD Student

I interviewed Katherine Delgado, a third-year PhD student at Columbia University in the Barnhart Neurobiology Lab. She earned her undergraduate degree in General Biology from Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. 

How did you decide that you wanted to pursue graduate school?

I didn’t really know about grad school when I started, and I decided that I wanted to continue lab work. One of my professors told me that Ph.D.s were fully funded … so I knew that if I could get into a program, I could accept an offer. [This is compared to] getting into a masters program, [where] I didn’t know how I was going to pay for that. I put all those pieces together my senior year so it was too late to apply. [Instead] I stayed and worked in a lab to make sure that I actually wanted to work in a lab for the rest of my life. It kind of fell into place and sounded like a good way to spend some time. 

What are you working on in the lab now? 

You do get a master's as part of this program, so I technically already have one master's degree. The first two years you do some coursework and fulfill the master's requirements. I'm in my third year, so I'm done with coursework and I [will] get one more master's degree at the end of my fourth year. Currently, in the lab I am plugging away at my dissertation project: I have identified a project and presented it to my dissertation advisory committee [who have] passed me on to the next level of a Ph.D. which is candidacy. I have to meet with my committee regularly to show them my progress, so it's pretty open-ended. 

What is the basis for your project? 

My lab is a Drosophila – a fruit fly – neurobiology lab. We are interested in the cells in the visual system of the brain. People in the lab work on different aspects of the cell biology of these particular neurons. I particularly am hoping to understand how intracellular calcium contributes to and changes the cell’s function as well as the circuit’s function. I’m kind of uniquely poised to do this because … in these cells, we can dissect the head of the fly, and expose the brain but keep the fly alive. Then [we] can use two-photon imaging [techniques] to image their cells, and since we are looking at visual system neurons, I can show my flies a movie, and make their cells light up. We are using the stimulus presentation to understand what these cells respond to and how different parts of the cells respond in a living animal. Often other people can do these things but it is with cultured cells or brain slices or things taken out of context. My project is pretty open-ended because we are just trying to see what happens. 

What is a day in the lab like here at Columbia? 

I usually come in at nine and set up the process for my flies. I can come in and collect my flies [from their viles]. I usually do [this] in the morning because it is more time-sensitive. Then if I am imaging, I will image in six-hour blocks so I will either do that in the morning or afternoon. If I'm doing that in the morning I usually come in a little earlier to get the scope setup and image for a few hours. When I’m not imaging I usually have analysis to do. We [also] have little lab chores that we all have to do that get dispersed throughout the day. I usually try to save some time to do reading to catch up on literature, it's important to stay up to date. 

A big secret of being in a Ph.D. program is going to a bunch of talks. There are a bunch of different seminars … some that I’m required to go to throughout the day. My lab is mostly what you call a dry lab - I work with the flies and then image and then a lot of my work is done on the computer. I break up the day however I feel, it's kind of self-directed. So the main things that occupy my time are doing the fly work, imaging, analysis, reading, having meetings with my advisor, and then going to seminars. 

What other activities do you like to do outside of the lab? 

I do a lot of stuff at home, I bake, knit, and read a lot. And living in NY there is usually so much to do. I like walking to random places and being on a street that I’ve never been on. I try to go to every museum every year.