Class Blog

For our most recent assignment, a digital video project, I recorded footage of the UW Raccoon Project.

While we do do some fun things, like trapping and processing raccoons, this is part of our dead season, so there really wasn’t a ton to video. I managed to get video of our new project manager checking camera traps and setting up a new pod experiment (which is pretty top secret because it’s brand new in the field, so I couldn’t get much on it).

I enjoyed the actual filming, and seeing what I could do with shots. I also enjoyed planning out what shots would go where with what background noise, whether it was the sound that came with the video,  or another sound clip cut over it. It was creative, but not so incredibly much that I’d completely blank on what to do (as I tend to do on overly creative things). There was a nice flow to follow that kind of naturally fell into place, which pleasantly surprised me.

I’m going to be honest though, when it came to the actual editing part, I wanted to pull my hair out in great chunks. Repeatedly. I used Adobe Premier, and I’m not certain if it was the program or me, or a little bit of both, but my goodness I could not get it to play nicely. It kept doing this thing that I termed “cannibalizing” where if I accidentally put one clip over another, and then moved it when I realized my mistake, the first clip was permanently clipped to where the second one had fallen on it. What a pain! (Among other problems…) I also had some issues with audio that I couldn’t figure out how to fix (you can probably tell where).

I wish I’d realized just how shaky I was when I was filming some shots. The person I was filming was not one to redo something just so I could get a better shot, so I just had to deal with what I got. If I’d known how shaky I was (especially when walking), I would have tried to do something (not sure what, but something), to mitigate that.

Overall, this was a frustrating project. I don’t particularly like my final product, to be honest. Sure, there are parts that I like, but I wish I’d had more opportunities to shoot and reshoot. I think that some parts could certainly be fixed, and I would have nixed the entire second interview if I could have. Then the editing software just made me irritated.

In the future, I wouldn’t mind directing a film project. I would like to be in the editing area saying “Ooo, put this here! Put that there, and this over here.” but I don’t want to be the actual person doing the actual clip moving and cutting and such.

Video can be a powerful communication tool, so I don’t think I’ll be escaping it any time soon.

And I’d just like to say, yes, it’s a little boring of a video. But it is a part of our research. Science isn’t always glamorous and fun and entertaining. For the majority of the year, this is what we do, or even less. There are fun parts to the project, but it’s also important to see the not fun parts, the tedious parts, and the downright annoying parts, because that’s what science is. It’s not always “eureka!’s” and playing with cute little critters, sometimes it’s checking an empty camera trap for the third time that week. That’s just how it is. And with that being said, *gets off of soapbox*.

This week, we promoted our blog and some of our posts on Instagram. Before this assignment, I had quite a bit of experience with Instagram, both in a personal and professional capacity. I have my own private Instagram account that I used to promote my stories (username engelivy – it’s a private account, so you have to follow it to see anything), and I also manage the various Instagram accounts of three different organizations (The UW Raccoon Project, University of Wyoming McNair Scholars, Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, Women in STEM Conference, Science Kitchen).

I didn’t really have much experience with Canva before this project, beyond having just heard about it.  I did like it though, so I hope to use it in the future as well.

My promotional voice changed according to the topic of each post. For example, my My Maps post is very conversational, so my caption was also very conversational. For the most part, I tried to use pictures from my blog posts, though some of them I tried to make the Canva post reflect the post as best I could. For example, I tried to keep my Canva for the Williams Conservatory post very clean and refreshing, like the pictures. The My Maps Canva is very lighthearted and fun, like the post itself. I honestly lucked out with finding the templates that I used.

One of the things I didn’t like about the assignment is that some of my blog posts (for example, the photojournalism assignment) were not something I necessarily felt like sharing. I didn’t really like the photos I took for it, and it felt weird to promote it. It also felt kind of awkward to promote the posts to my friends and family, simply because I don’t particularly like doing that type of thing – it feels really awkward to me. Something I need to work on.

I was kind of surprised at the amount of likes some of the posts received. I honestly wouldn’t have been shocked if some of them didn’t get any likes at all.

Originally I thought that I should just post all of my posts all at once and kind of late at night (see two paragraphs above), but after I’d posted them, I realized that I should have spread them out a bit. There were some that I would have liked to actually promote and have people go read, but I didn’t think that far ahead. Mixing them in with the others and posting them when I did reduce their visibility and people’s interest, and it felt weird to delete the posts and then repost them.

Social media is the future of communication, and especially science communication.  It’s an informal platform for interacting and communicating with others. Considering I’m going into scicomm, I know that I will be working on social media quite a bit. Instagram is also becoming one of the more popular platforms right now, making being proficient in its use even more relevant.

Our most recent assignment was to live Tweet an event for our followers. I chose to Tweet the Jelly Bean Jam that was put on by Highland Park Community Church on Sunday, April 7. You can check out my Tweets here!

I tried to use a journalistic approach for this assignment. I didn’t know enough about the event to do a PR approach, and it honestly would have felt kind of weird to be “pumping up” the event. It definitely lent itself more to a journalistic approach.

Though I enjoyed picking out things that were interesting to me to post, it was also kind of hard. I kept missing the start of things before I realized that it would be good to post.  I really need to work on my listening-for-retention skills at nonschool events. I wish I had paid better attention, because there were quite a few things I had to simply not use because I didn’t get the beginning information.

Another issue I had was that the lights on stage messed with my camera, so it was really hard to get good photos or videos of anything on stage.

It was also kind of hard to get direct quotes from people to put on Twitter. Getting it word-for-word in the moment was difficult, and the people I talked to just continued talking and talking, making picking out quotable portions was difficult. Not to mention the character limit! However, people were very amicable about talking with me, which was nice.

I know I probably missed a couple small requirements throughout because I wanted to just get the Tweet up so that I could move on to another if something happened. I also didn’t have the requirements right in front of me, I was just working on memory.

I wonder if it will become more second nature for me to Tweet in AP style once I’ve been in the field and constantly using it than it was now. I had to go back and rewrite some posts into AP style because Twitter doesn’t have an “edit” feature. I would have liked to edit a couple posts, but I didn’t catch them until after the event. It wouldn’t have made sense to rewrite the posts and have them at the top of the Tweets because that would have thrown off the order and the flow of the Tweets, so I just left them.

This was definitely one of the harder assignments we’ve had so far, in my opinion.

My least favorite thing about this assignment was that I had to be on my phone for it. I felt so rude being on it, and I didn’t want people to think I’m just another disrespectful kid. I swear, if I wasn’t working on an assignment, I wouldn’t be on my phone!

I also run into this problem with two of my jobs. I run the social media for the NASA Space Grant Consortium and the McNair Scholars, plus I volunteer to run the social media for the UW Raccoon Project. Even though I’m checking notifications for those accounts or posting on them, I still feel like I’m just another millennial who’s obsessed with their phone.

I know I will be using social media in my future career. Right now, two of my paid jobs and a volunteer position are focused on social media. It is a highly relevant form of communication and outreach that is very informal and wide-reaching. We aren’t going to stop using it any time soon.

Our most recent project for this class was to interview someone and record it, then edit it to make a clean, finished product. I interviewed Emily Violini, a friend and fellow student, about what it was like being a pre-vet student.

I definitely forgot to take a picture of Emily, and I had to text her to get one. It worked out pretty well because we both happened to have free time at the same time and she was in the building that is perhaps one of the most relevant to her. I’m really glad we got a picture in that building specifically because it definitely wasn’t planned that way.

Raw interview: https://soundcloud.com/i-e-engel/raw-interview-emily-violini

Edited interview: https://soundcloud.com/i-e-engel/edited-interview-emily-violini

I’ve interviewed people in the past and I always record them. Sometimes I use an old fashioned recorder, sometimes I use my phone, and this time, I used my laptop (and recorded straight into audacity). I also had a backup – my phone was recording at the same time. I’ve never recorded an interview with my laptop, as I usually use it for note-taking during the interview, so it was a little bit weird to do. It felt kind of uncomfortable to have it sitting open between us. However, when I use my phone or recorder, I feel just fine. It’s easy to just set it and forget it.

I actually kind of enjoyed the editing portion of the project. I enjoyed finding little errors and being able to zoom all the way in and very carefully cut and splice and delete and make the error disappear. I did run into one issue though – my interviewee oftentimes strings her words together (especially her “ums” with her next word). This made it extremely difficult to cut out the “ums” (you’ll see I left one in, because there was no way I was getting that baby out). I didn’t wholly succeed with some of the places where her “ums” ran into her words or her words just ran together, and while it irritates the bejeesus out of me, I just have to accept it and move on. Maybe when I have more experience I’ll be able to fix them.

It actually surprised me a little bit how easy (for the most part) it was to edit the audio, and how much I enjoyed it.

My walls are very thin and I had a couple loud vehicles drive past while I was interviewing Emily. I hadn’t even thought about this, but I wish I had – it ruined a section that I was hoping to use. I knew I had enough good stuff without that section though, so I decided not to rerecord the interview.

I think that I could possibly end up working in audio in my future. I could use a little bit of audio storytelling, perhaps as a podcast or something to use as a tool to humanize science and scientists. Plus, there is that internship this summer…

Walk into the Brown Lab on the University of Wyoming campus, and you enter a whole new world. The shelves are overflowing with scientific instruments, books and bottles of chemicals.

On one side in the back, a mini surgery. Off to the other side, a microscope that looks more like a robot than an instrument for studying samples.

In this slightly chaotic lab, the mysteries of the reward circuits in the brain are being slowly unraveled, one rat at a time.

Rats and Food Addiction

First-year graduate student Georgia Kirkpatrick is interested in how different kinds of food can affect the way that a rat’s brain is built, which may be correlated with addiction to that food.

To study this, rats start on a standard chow diet. Then, those that are being studied either stay on that diet or are switched to a high fat diet. After the rats have eaten their assigned diet for a while, Kirkpatrick then switches some of the high fat rats back to a standard chow diet for another period of time.

Then, using a program called ImageJ, she studies the structures of the prefrontal cortex of each groups’ brains by comparing beautiful images of each slice, with the structures dyed for contrast.

“We’re looking at why people are so drawn to highly palatable foods – so those foods that taste good, like salt, sugar, fat,” said Kirkpatrick, “I look at the prefrontal cortex to see kind of what’s happening in those regions with perineuronal nets.”

Perineuronal nets are related to learning and memory and they can change when rats are exposed to different circumstances, such as a change in food. By studying these structures in each group, we can learn more about how the brain is changed by the addition, and sometimes the subsequent removal, of something like a high fat diet.

Rats, Food Addiction and Exercise

Another project that Kirkpatrick is working on is looking at the effect of exercise on the perineuronal nets of each diet group.

These rats are fed one of the two diets mentioned earlier and some animals from both diets are placed on an exercise regime. Later, when Kirkpatrick looks at their brains, she is looking to see if there is a difference between those rats that exercised and those that did not.

Rats and Drug Addiction

            Emily Jorgensen, a third-year grad student also in the Brown Lab is also interested in addiction and the effects on the brain, but she typically works with a little harder stuff than high-fat foods.

“There are some similarities that are emerging that are tying reward for food to reward with drugs of abuse such as cocaine – what I study specifically,” said Jorgensen, “I also work with a junk food diet that we make, and we study that to see if that reward pathway is similar to cocaine as well.”

To study how rats interact with cocaine, Jorgensen places them into a two-chambered box. In one chamber, they get a shot of saline. In the other, a shot of cocaine. She gives the rats time to learn which chamber gets which shot, and then she erases their perineuronal nets.

The main part of the erasing happens before the rats even go into the box, when Jorgensen adds tubes to the brain where the nets are. Then, after their learning period in the boxes, she adds an enzyme in the tubes that painlessly degrades the nets.

After removal of the nets, the rats no longer show a preference to the cocaine side of the box. But researchers are still not certain what is actually happening when the nets are removed.

“We don’t exactly know why – if they’re actually forgetting, if they’re losing that rewarding effect or if the nets are doing something else completely. So that’s what I’m trying to do right now is figure out exactly how those nets around cells are behaving,” said Jorgensen.

The long-term goal of Jorgensen’s work is to find a way to target these centers where memories are strengthened and consolidated and eliminate relapse events in drug addicts. Though there are promising data in rats, in her words, “we are lightyears away from clinical trials in humans.”

Science as a Lifestyle

Kirkpatrick and Jorgensen are both highly passionate about their fields of study, which is important in grad school.

“It is both a wonderful learning experience and extremely frustrating time. You find limits you didn’t know you had and you learn how to push past those limits,” said Amy Rhoad, another third-year grad student, and longtime friend of Kirkpatrick’s.

Kirkpatrick echoed similar sentiments about grad school and science.

She said “It’s really hard, and science can be incredibly frustrating sometimes because it doesn’t always go the way you want it to – it never goes away you want it to – but I think that that’s also kind of what’s beautiful about it. You’re always working and striving to learn something new and being really self-reflective on you as a researcher and kind of what’s happening with your data, to open up new questions. It’s an always thriving, growing field and I love that ’cause you never know everything.”

-IEE-