My interest in the DIY Diagnostics stream was actually sparked long before my knowledge of the Freshman Research Initiative, and long before my enrollment in UT, and, if we’re being very specific, long before my acceptance to the university at all. As a senior in high school, my AP biology teacher offered us extra credit to attend Hot Science: Cool Talks at UT. The “Cool Talk” I ventured to was hosted by Dr. Andrew Ellington and it was all about self-diagnosis. Or rather, diagnosing yourself at home, made to be as simple as the at home pregnancy test. You do it at home and if you realize you have an illness that needs medical attention you can get to a doctors office. If you just have the common cold, you stay at home and save you and your doctor time. This was really interesting to me and it made lots of sense; finding something that saves time and money – I’m in! I’m also constantly looking for things that interest me, because it seems I have this chronic state of boredom I am trying to shake.
So, I did my one page write up of this extremely “hot” science, turned it in, got my five points of extra credit and moved on. Over the next however many months I ended up out of high school and at UT in the Freshman Research Initiative and was a few months away from having to apply to streams. As soon as I saw DIY Diagnostics I was reminded of that talk that had so caught my interest. I realized I couldn’t make any of the open houses and scheduled a meeting with the RE, Dr. Tim Riedel. And after that I was pretty sure there wasn’t another stream I wanted be in.
Being in the DIY Diagnostics lab is like being a real researcher, because you are a real researcher, which feels very hard at first for someone who has never been in a “real” lab before. You do everything on your own, and if you are me, you do it with a serious lack of confidence the first go around. By the end of the year I had mastered skills I didn’t even know existed before this class and was performing tasks that had taken me half an hour in the beginning of the year in half that time. The first time I felt like an actual scientist was during our weekly meetings when we were having a discussion that sounded like science and I understood all of it, and had responses and we were all formulating things together that would have sounded like garble to me three months prior.
One of my favorite diagnostics we did was using dog saliva. Now before I get into it, we did not get any valid results from experiment, not one person out of the 35-40 students. But I am starting to learn this is less about being distraught about failure and more about learning what to do differently the next time around. Those of us with dogs had to swab the dog’s mouth, fill out a survey on the dog’s behavior, then extract the DNA in the dogs mouth and see if we could link any of the DNA to behavioral characteristics. Pretty cool, I know, but it didn’t work. This semester I would like to figure out why it didn’t work, or at least how to get it to work. I love this stream because I am able to make my own decisions like that. And I’m sure if I suddenly develop a hatred for dogs and their saliva I have no doubt Tim would help me figure out something else to benefit the stream but also keep me from being totally miserable. DIY is a well-run, very interesting lab. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to feel like a scientist and really have a integral part of their research experience. I will now refrain from making any puns involving Labrador retrievers and research labs, but I will include a picture of my photogenic dog whose saliva I have and will be testing.