Bucknell University Athletics
There is No Off-Season for the Student-Athlete: A Bucknell Volleyball Summer Experience
6/13/2008 8:00:00 AM | Volleyball
June 13, 2008
LEWISBURG, Pa. - Throughout the summer, members of the Bucknell volleyball squad will be checking in and sharing the various educational endeavors they are pursuing while away from Lewisburg. Here is the first installment, courtesy of rising-senior co-captain, neuroscience major, Sheena Czipri.
Greetings from Rochester, N.Y.! It's unbelievably beautiful here. The campus looks a lot like Bucknell with gorgeous red brick and stone buildings. The University is much larger than Bucknell, having three major campuses. I live on the undergraduate campus that runs along the river in a dorm directly across from the gym (How convenient!). It has this beautiful river trail which has become my new favorite place to run. The library takes my breath away. It's absolutely beautiful and right when you walk in is a huge stone staircase with gorgeous decorations. It looks like an art history museum. The main study area is decorated like a little café, so it has a very comfortable feel. I work on the medical campus in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. It ends up being only a ten minute walk which isn't so bad. The graduate lab building in the Med Center where I work is connected to this huge research building on one side and a hospital on the other. It's a little overwhelming and very easy to get lost!
My research is really picking up now. It's primarily studying neurophysiology rather than vision like I had expected, and the monkeys are SOOOO adorable. They are rhesus macaque monkeys, so they are fairly little. The general scope of my research is doing two main things. 1) I stimulate different cells in the superior colliculus and calculate the degrees of head and eye movements in response to the stimulation and 2) I do single-cell electrode recordings in neurons that respond to head/eye movements in response to target lights. It's a lot cooler than it sounds, I promise. Also, there are so many precautionary measures to protect us and the monkeys. I have to wear a full scrub suit, face shield, foot scrubbies, gloves, and a mask. It's a rough look for the me and all the face shields are way too big for my little head! I had to go through a lot of training, but now I can interact more with the monkeys. I hand-feed them and some actually let me pet them. I also get to set them up in their little work chairs before we start our studies. I'm also learning how to work all the equipment and computer software. There's soooo many knobs that I'm going to need more than ten works to learn them all!
Everyone in my lab is wonderful. The research assistant is this Canadian "I just like to eat" tough guy with the funniest jokes and the Postdoc is this quiet little French woman. The tech assistant is an all around mom, even in the lab, who loves motorcycles and the graduate student just laughs at everyone all the time. He wants to be a teacher and has been incredibly helpfully explaining all the details of the research to me. I also work with two undergraduate students, one goes to the University and the other's hometown is Rochester. They've been keeping me filled in on the social life of the city. Dr. Freedman who runs the lab is so amazing. He's an avid volleyball player and so is his wife. She was all All-American at Brown and both of their kids play club, so he spends his mornings helping me find places to play while I'm here. I'm highly appreciative, I miss playing!!!!
The people in my program are all really outgoing and everyone gets along really well. We go out on the weekends together or hang out in the dorms during the week. The program has a lot of events for us which has really helped us get comfortable with each other. The conversations range from pizza and Wal-Mart to enzymes and recombinant DNA. Sometimes I just have to nod my head and smile, pretending like I know what the words mean that they are using...haha. I'm really glad though that everyone gets along, it has made the transition a lot easier for me.
- Sheena Czipri '09
