Mayo Clinic Visit

Everyone who works, go to school, or do something all week long, and have saturdays and sundays off, looks forward to Friday..

It is the last day of the week..

Today is the conference day, where we get to go to Mayo Clinic, Arizona campus, to the Arizona Alzheimer's Consortium Annual Scientific Conference..

I am finally going to visit Mayo Clinic, the place I always wanted to visit, and never knew there is a nice campus of it in Arizona..

Mayo Clinic has existed for more than 100 years..

We left the house later today, so I did not wake up till way later than usual; it was 8:30 am when I woke up..

Left the house at around 9:00 am..

I was like a little child, too excited that I was looking at everything around me..

When we arrived, the architecture amazed me, they are really cool..

We were there at around 9:40 am or so.. They had breakfast, and they already had most of the posters set-up..

I met some of the students who were intern at the Banner Sun Health Research Institute, which I was placed to do my research at, but did not due to the lack of available housing for younger people in Sun City..

Apparently, most of the students there started on their projects, where for us, students at Banner Alzheimer's Institute did not.. We were developing skills, and exploring the different options instead..

Back to the conference..

I checked in, got my name tag, in which my last name was spelled wrong, but I was fine with it..

In addition to that I got the list abstracts, and the schedule of the conference..

The schedule was:

• Welcoming by Dr. Caselli from Mayo Clinic
• Introduction by Dr. Reiman the director of Arizona Alzheimer's Consortium and CEO of Banner Research Institute
• Keynote speaker: Dr. Klunk from the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at University of Pittsburgh 
• Lunch time with VERY short time to look at the poster presentation (one hour total)
• Oral research presentation (9 of them)
• Finally, closing by Dr. Reiman

I really like the keynote speaker, he was really good, but his presentation had a lot of information. I learned a lot from it, but if there is anything I am going to tell the people about it, it will be that he and his lab partner discovered the PiB compound in 2004 (PiB= Pittsburgh Compound B), which could be used in PET scans instead of fluorescent to see plaques in the brain, so it is used for studies investigating Alzheimer's Disease.

For posters, there were about 100 of them, and there was no way I could have seen all of them. I think I only saw about 20 of them.

At the end of the conference, I tried to look at the rest of the posters, but they were gone. I still tried to stay for as long as possible in Mayo Clinic, so we did not leave till about 4 pm..

On the way back home, we talked about many things, about Arizona, politics, history, and social justice. I realized that I am interested in those topics, so it might be time for me to read more about them. I also realized how quiet I am. I thought I changed, but I did not, I am still the quiet person who listens and act instead of talk. I am not sure if that is a good thing or not, but I think happy with it for now even if it puts me in situations where I cannot say anything in..

Sad story about the conference:

There was a girl who is interested in research, and wanted to do research related to aging. She was in her last year, and was going to go to grad school to continue on with her research. She was influential and dedicated person. They had three posters about research she worked on. In March, she was diagnosed with cancer, so she did not take her finals, and then she died recently. They dedicated the conference for her. I found this story about her graduation, which was brought to her in the hospital: http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/region_southeast_valley/mesa/asu-grad-gets-personal-diploma-ceremony-

The rest of the day was like follow: going to the bus station to get public transportation pass, which I failed at because the bus station closes at 4 pm, so I ended up just taking some pictures of my neighborhood. Then I talked to my friend Jennifer, and did some reading. Then it was just time to think and try to sleep.

Pictures

I realized that I have not put any pictures yet, so here are some of the pictures I took