Amanda Chou (Webmistress/Historian)

   Wheee. In mid-June, I stepped onto a plane, by myself, on my way to spend two awesome months of my summer overseas~ Taiwan. (For those of you to whom Taiwan elicits a "whaaaa?": it's a small island off the southeastern coast of China. Main languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese and very broken English.) That's because I had applied to an internship program called Taiwan Tech Trek which posts a list of internships every spring and invites overseas students to apply to up to three internships. Me? I'd gotten into a lab in a national research center (think LBL-esque).
   After the orientation, I found myself living with family-friends in Taipei and working in a biophysics lab with two other TTT interns, each of us working with different grad students on different projects. I was in a project that investigated the workings of an e.coli protein complex. Unfortunately, things really do like to fail in research (etching machines and even the proteins!!), so I never did get to do much of the microfluidics like I'd hoped. But I still got to play around with the setups (actually experiment with stuff) and work with a number of microscopes (and a laser). Now I find myself saying what I know other students say about overseas experiences: if you find the opportunity, at least apply for it and DO IT. It's fun and has a 99.9% chance of being totally worthwhile. Really. The .1% covers accidental food poisoning, local government idiocy and terrorismat the airport.