The Guitarrón Chronicles is back with another update! This week’s blogger is none other than our chaotic violinist and fellow Murt resident, Jason!

 

‧₊˚❀‧₊˚. Jason’s Summer Update 7-28-25 ‧₊˚❀‧₊˚.

Hi y’all! I briefly escaped from lab work to deliver a quick recap of what I’ve been up to this summer.

 

Guatemala Internship 🩹🩺
Kicking off the summer, I had the opportunity to go to Guatemala as a medical intern with the Rice Chapter of VAW Global Health Alliances for 2 weeks. More specifically, we worked with local clinics around San Pedro La Laguna to provide free healthcare, medical records, and medications to around 600 patients!

I basically rotated every day to one of four possible shifts: intake 📋 (writing down their age, address, etc other patient information), vitals 🩺 (taking their height, weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, etc), shadowing 👨‍⚕️ (a local doctor), and pharmacy 💊 (typing the patient information into a database and packaging free medications to hand out). Not only did I brush up on my medical Spanish, but I can now comfortably assess basic vitals (even with the sphygmomanometer)!

(Me shadowing a physician!)

There’s so much that I’ve learned in the clinic, but my favorite days were either shadowing a local physician who spoke Spanish and K’iche (a local Mayan language) or taking vitals. Being able to directly interact with patients and working to overcome healthcare barriers was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I’m sure I didn’t do it enough justice in the brief summary above.

 

Guatemala Free Days
While we were worked to the bone during clinic days, we had some free days too! (where we were also worked to the bone since San Pedrowas so hilly… it effectively was my leg workout for the year)

From kayaking to ziplining to hiking, I must say that Guatemala is a beautiful country that definitely makes you work before the reward. (Especially the Nariz del Indio hike in Santa Clara La Laguna that had us wake up at 4 AM to practically crawl our way up a mountain in the dark to see the sunrise…totally worth it!!)

 

Summer Research 🔬💉

Here’s the main thing now that’s keeping me a bit busy: I’m working in a lab at MD Anderson that focuses on biliary tract and bladder cancers! From sitting in the lab for hours to grow and passage tumor cells to standing in the animal lab for hours feeding mice to see which combination of treatments best reduces tumor sizes, it’s been a tiring but fulfilling couple of weeks. I’ll spare you the finer details, but the experiments have been going pretty well!

The other main project I’ve been working on in my lab is analyzing a huge Excel sheet that contains the biliary tract cancer mutational data of around 4000 patients and making figures that compare different subtypes of cancer from this huge database. From ICC to ECC to DCC to PCC to GBC, the full forms of these abbreviations will practically make a paragraph on their own. Honestly, I feel that if I stare at the Excel sheet long enough, the Excel sheet will stare right back at me…

But besides all the statistical analyses and redoing everything from the beginning (again) since my PI has a different idea of what data he wants to show, I have to say that Tableau Public (a free!! graph generator) is genuinely my saving grace in making these figures.

 

Taking it day by day
In the mornings, I finally perfected making a double-sided Sunnyside-up egg to get me through the day (which I just learned was called “over easy” when writing this 😅). When I get home after lab, I just gotta run around my neighborhood and enjoy the inhumanely hot weather. (I swear, it was 92 degrees at 7 PM…)

Although things are busy (and they will probably/definitely get busier), I’m glad to join you for this week on the Guitarrón Chronicles, and I’m excited for next semester with the mariachi family!

Take care,
Jason

 

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Thanks Jason!! See you all later!

Danielle & Hannah

Mariachi Luna Llena