I chose DIY because it was the only lab that I felt had the potential to make an impact in our world today. Our lab conducts research that aims to develop practical diagnostic tools for our world today. It isn’t a lab where you spend years studying something before any real progress is made or all you do is work with plants for the entire duration of the lab. The practical applications of our research is what really drew me in.
The Zika diagnostic tool is still very interesting and relevant in our world today. The diagnostic tool that really interests me however is the Parkinson’s disease/Mental Health project. As a neuroscience major, this project is very intriguing to me and I am really excited to begin working on it. As an individual who has ALS running in his family, any opportunity to study and research ways to assist those with debilitating neurological disorders fascinates me and draws me in.
I tell them that I am getting to do real research as a freshman that could actually have an impact. It isn’t chem lab, bio lab, or any other basic lab one takes for a course requirement where the procedures are laid out and the results are already determined. I am getting to work on things that are relevant to the world today and answer questions that are still left unanswered.
At this point in my life, I do not consider myself a researcher or scientist. I still don’t know enough and I haven’t produced any meaningful results. That being said, I do feel that DIY has put me on a path that would allow me to become a scientist or researcher. This lab has taught me many valuable skills that are key to working on research. I’ve also gotten to experience a bit of what working in a research lab feels like. While I may not be a scientist or researcher yet, I am well on my way.
Being in DIY specifically has helped me a lot with my time management. Having to schedule on spend 6 hours in lab on your own time requires a lot of commitment and planning on an individual’s part. Because of DIY I now keep a pretty updated calendar which has drastically helped with my planning. I also really learn how to take advantage of the time that you have. There are not a lot of hours in the day but DIY shows you how to make the most out of those hours. An hour doesn’t seem like a lot but you can get a lot done in that hour if you put in the time and work efficiently. Say you are waiting for something to finish incubating in the lab. You could just sit there or you could work on other things or projects that need to get done while you wait. I wouldn’t be as good at these skills if not for DIY.
Programming was really stressful for me. It was a whole new experience for me because I had never coded before this lab. Each assignment was a struggle for me. I didn’t know where to start and it often took me days to finish the assignments while some people could finish them in a few hours. That being said, it felt really good for me when I finally got the assignment worked. The things we did were really simple but it made me feel pretty excited when I could get it to work.
I didn’t really understand the nanophotometer and the Qubit the first few times we used them. They would constantly mess up for me and wouldn’t give me the results that others were getting. Around the third assignment in which we used these devices however, I finally got good results. I didn’t necesarrily discover that I was making some super huge error that was ruining my results. Rather I found at that I had probably made a bunch of little mistakes along the way that added up to one big failure. By the 3rd time however I think that I had gotten good enough at the procedure that the errors were eliminated and I got good results because of this.
I really enjoyed talking with the mentors and my peers. The mentors are all really cool and just getting to have casual conversation with them was a lot of fun. They were all really approachable and would often help answer questions regarding future classes we were planning on taking which was also nice. I also met a lot of cool people that I would consider my friends through this stream that I don’t think I would of met without DIY.
Specifically, in our stream, I know for a fact that we work a lot more than other streams. I don’t mind this however because when I tell people about what we do in DIY, almost all of them respond with, “that’s really cool,” or my personal favorite,” that’s way cooler than my stream.” I feel that I had a very good experience. I know a lot of people that didn’t really enjoy FRI but when you talk to people from our stream, almost all of them enjoyed it.