When I first heard about FRI, I had no idea what stream I wanted to research in. I was walking into all the info sessions with an open mind. What caught my attention first about DIY was the amount of diversity in majors: there were people who were in, engineering, biology, computer science, and even neuroscience like me. It was really refreshing to see! I chose DIY because of the excitement and curiosity everyone displayed about their own little projects and they sounded so passionate describing everything. The lab was working on diagnostics for local projects, like Waller Creek, to international ones such as Zika as well, and it was just really cool to see such a wide range of ideas.
It was definitely fun to try and explain to my friends and family what exactly I was doing in the lab because it can’t really be summarized in a sentence. One week we would be taking samples from Waller Creek to test, while the next we’d be doing a sort of PCR test, and then the week after it’d be 3D printing! Seeing everyone’s eyes go wide as I was recapping my semester was pretty funny to say the least.
Even though I have had about a year’s worth of lab experience, I still sometimes catch myself if I refer to myself as a scientist or a researcher. When you think of scientists, you think of old people in lab coats, rubbing your chin speculatively, and doing long tedious cycles of centrifuging. And even though scientists do all above the above quite a lot, we also do a lot of collaborative work, collecting samples from questionable places, and even wanting to pull your hair out in frustration because you forgot one semicolon at the end of a long line of code. So in a long story short kind of way, I do consider myself a scientist and a researcher because at this point it would kind of be silly not to.
One memory I will always remember (partly because it was recorded on a news channel and will probably remain on the catacombs of the internet forever and also because it was super embarrassing) is me holding a pipette in a not-so-correct manner. Fortunately I was in the background of said video for a split second so its fine now, but I wanted to hide forever when I saw that clip for the first time. It had been the first week of lab and we were all learning how to pipette correctly and I held the pipette in an almost horizontal way, which would have been disastrous if a chemical had been in the pipette tip at the time. A news reporter was also in the lab at the same time just asking questions about DIY and diagnostics in general. A positive outcome from that scarring experience is that I always hold my pipette up the right way regardless of the situation. The proper pipetting procedure has been ingrained into my brain
All in all I am really glad I chose this stream to be my FRI stream because I learned a ton of skills in only a semester, and have gotten to know some really cool people! The experiments and projects we do are also a lot of fun and it is ok to make mistakes on assignments! How else does one learn if failure isn’t in the books every once in a while? I would undoubtedly choose this stream again because it’s just a really nice environment that fosters growth and teamwork without being too slack.