Reflection On Workplacement

Introduction

The workplacement was a part of HAN University of Applied Sciences’ Life sciences study program for students to gain real working and social experience in a professional laboratory environtment, either in academic or company background. It is therefore considered as a training for the graduation project and subsequently further scientific career path. My workplacement took place in Plant Research International of Wageningen University Research starting from 2nd February to 2nd July 2015. Under the supervision of Rumyana Karlova, I was given the chance to take a small part in her project to study the role of ripening-associated transcription factor Colorless non ripening (CNR) and plant hormone brassinosteroids in tomato fruit

I managed to read most of these articles (highlighting the important information I need regarding the project) as well as doing a little research on the internet. Although I had difficulties understanding the whole article, I was able to get the basic knowledge about the genes or hormone or transcription factor studied for the project. However, it was not until the day I started writing my introduction for the report that I started searching and reading more articles to get a much better understanding on the objects studied in this project. As a result, I realized that some of the new informations I got could have helped me analyzed some results and drew better conclusions for the experiments I did previously. Therefore, I learnt that I have to search for and read more articles at the beginning of the workplacement, or at least after doing a new experiment, to get a better understanding on the results and drawing conclusions for my

This action was very useful for me when I have to do similar experiments, as well as identifying the problem that might occur during an experiment. I also listed down all of the samples analyzed in each experiments, labelled and organized them properly in order to make it easy for me to keep track on these samples (because I had a lot of samples to be analyzed, especially for RNA isolation/qPCR measurement and construct design for subcellular localization experiments). As for keeping my lab journal up-to-date, I tried to rewrite the informations I put in my notes in my lab journal in a more organized and understandable format when I have free time because sometimes I have one day full of experiments. However, it was not that much of a problem as I already keep my notes as organized and detailed as