Jessica Ward has spent the last two years teaching monkeys to count.
Working in an on-campus psychology lab, the junior takes the monkeys out of their cages, sits them in chairs and locks them in a soundproof booth. Then she encourages them to first touch one square and then two.
"It takes lots of treats and lots of patience," she said.
Ward, a pre-veterinary student, is one of many Duke students who gave up a summer in Rome or a job waiting tables to work in a science laboratory. Some go into the job with dreams of finishing an entire project and are usually disappointed, but many enter with lower expectations and come out of the experience with a whole new perspective and set of skills.
"I thought I'd be mixing things and repeating something that's already been done," said sophomore Matt Fischer. Instead, Fischer arrived at his lab to discover he would be performing miniature surgeries, extracting bronchial tubes from mice and threading wires through them.
"It's really cool that you get to have a piece of something that on one else was looking at," Fischer said. Like many other students working in labs, Fischer was working on cutting-edge research this summer.
Junior Emily Heikamp spent the first half of her summer working at a renowned bio-genetics lab in Cambridge, England. "When I got there, the first thing they told me was, 'You can't tell anyone this. It's totally top secret,'" Heikamp said. "It was sort of intimidating."
Heikamp added that she struggled to find textbooks explaining the background for her summer work until her mentor at the lab told her it was not in textbooks yet. "'You can't always take scientific textbooks as fact,' he told me. It totally took my world down," Heikamp said.
Many students said a vast majority of early lab work is just learning the vocabulary. Fischer said he spent the first few weeks of work reading every journal article written about mice's bronchial tubes--a task much larger than he expected.
Heikamp, who now uses cell names of seemingly random letter and number combinations casually, said she was more impressed with the British vocabulary and culture she acquired from her colleagues.
"In the beginning I was searching on Google.com for 'apartments for rent,' and in the U.K. they call them 'flats for let,'" she said with a laugh.
Students said the easiest part about the work is finding it. Dozens of grants exist on Duke's campus, and labs are always looking for help.
Of course, working in a lab is not without its trials. Ward said one of the other keepers once locked her in a cage accidentally. "I had to do a MacGyver-like move to get out of there," she said. She added that dealing with monkeys can sometimes make problems outside the lab seem trivial.
"Nothing that a roommate can do is worse than having a monkey throw poop at you."
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