If not through science, contribute in some other way

Thursday, June 11, 2009 – 7:09pm

Today I also came in to lab at around 10:30am, a bit later than I wanted, so I’m aiming to go home early and be in tomorrow by 9am. In lab I did a few things and then sent the associate professor an e-mail with the notes I took yesterday at the conference about how to publish to nature. I wrote the e-mail in Japanese and then re-wrote it in *English* to make sure I didn’t mess up.

A bit later the professor checked his e-mail and called me up and he said it was great and thanked me a lot. I felt good! It’s kind of like, if I don’t do much in lab in terms of experiments, I try to help out in other ways. The professor sent my notes to the entire lab and told them to review the notes and to save them. Then he encouraged everyone to publish to Nature. It was nice. He also told everyone to thank me… :$

The professor was also impressed by my Kanji name (Japanese name written with Chinese characters) and he told me “That’s great! You should have cards with your name in Japanese!” It would have looked very Japanese but my last name can’t really be written with Chinese characters in Japanese, there’s not a good sound for Fe in Kanji.

A bit later someone threw a paper on my desk and when I look it had my name printed on it using Kanji and Katakana. It said “フェルナンデス御丸” which is my name, printed in different colors 4 times! I was like, what? When I looked back it was the professor! Haha, I just started laughing and then everyone in the lab looked at it and they were asking me questions like “that’s your name? OH SUGOIIIII (awesome).” Apparently Masato-kun chose a really good Kanji name for me!

Here is a picture of the paper:

When Prof. Murakami found out I had a Kanji name he thought it was awesome and printed this out.
When Prof. Murakami found out I had a Kanji name he thought it was awesome and printed this out.

Anyway, after that I just went out to lunch and had Tonkatsu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tonkatsu_set_by_zezebono_in_Sapporo,_Hokkaido.jpg) for ~$4.50. So good. Then I came back to lab and just prepared a few solutions, ran an SDS gel with my post-doc after purifying a protein, and that’s about it. I want to go home soon, or go to dinner with labmates, one of those two, so we’ll see how that goes.

Update: (9pm)
I went to dinner with one of my lab friends, the youngest one in the lab (‘masaya-san’), and we had a chicken dinner set. It was delicious. I keep being impressed by the food here in Japan! We had a nice dinner conversation and after that came back to the lab. Now I’m planning to go home soon since I don’t want to be trapped again the game of staying in too long and not having time to sleep! Tonight I’m going home and sleeping~ I also need to take care of a few things… such as laundry… but that can wait until Saturday. I don’t think I’ll be coming in to lab on Saturday since I was told it was okay for me to stay home, but I just feel bad knowing that everyone else comes in, and has to get work done, while I’ll be sleeping at home and discovering new things on my own. After all, they are so nice and friendly.


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2 responses to “If not through science, contribute in some other way”

  1. Yu Avatar
    Yu

    > I wrote the e-mail in Japanese and then re-wrote it in Japanese to make sure I didn’t mess up.

    You wrote it in Japanese twice??

    フェルナンデス御丸 is really good. I've thought how to describe “Fernandez” in Japanese for a long time, and ended up to thinking leaving it just katakana would be the best. You can dare to write it with kanji, such as “笛流男出須”, but it looks like 暴走族's team name…

  2. Omar Eduardo Fernandez Lebron Avatar

    Oh, sorry! thanks for catching that! I re-wrote it in English– I just fixed the post. 🙂

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