Agilent Internship

I’m now about three weeks or so into my Agilent Internship. My parents own a small townhouse up in the Bay Area (my dad was always going back and forth for work), so it has come in handy for me because it only takes twenty minutes to get to work. I also enjoy the peace and quiet, although at times I do get lonely, which is when I call Gus. On the weekends I come home to visit my parents.

My work at Agilent has been very interesting so far, and I’ve learned a lot. We still haven’t started on the actual experiment yet, but everything is finally starting to come along. Agilent just moved into the Santa Clara site a few months ago, and they are still remodeling the buildings, so it took a long time for everything to get set up. Our machines appear to be in working order now.

The great thing about this internship is that I came in just as Viorica, my boss, was starting this new project. So I can pretend that I know just as much as she does….or something like that. We’re studying enzymes called Matrix Metalloproteinases (MMPs), which are in the matrix where cells are located. MMPs do lots of things, from eating away at collagen or breaking up other parts of your body. If MMPs go out of hand, recent research suggests that they play a role in arthritis, cancer, and many other diseases. Essentially, they are an important batch of proteins that are worth looking at. Viorica and I are going to develop a method to detect MMPs with an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS). This particular machine allows you to determine the concentration of metal ions in a sample (which in our case will be blood serum), and MMPs are have a center of calcium and zinc. Want to learn how one works? It’s quite cool actually. Visit this link: http://ewr.cee.vt.edu/environmental/teach/smprimer/icpms/icpms.htm

At the moment we have been gathering a bunch of research articles to see what other people have done before us. No one has ever used an ICP-MS before to measure MMPs, so it’s rather unique. Soon though, we’ll start the real experiment!

I’m glad that I am doing an internship, it keeps me busy, keeps my mind working, and it’s fun earning money! I highly suggest you do something over the summer after your first year of college.