When it came down to applying for a stream at the end of my fall semester, the only stream that stuck out to me was the DIY diagnostic stream. To be honest, after visiting all the open houses and looking at background information, I was completely overwhelmed. I didn’t know half the words the research educators were saying, which raised some red and white flags immediately in my head. However, when stumbling across the “do it yourself” stream, I felt better knowing what the words in the name actually meant. DIY was a word I was extremely familiar with due to my excessive obsession with arts and crafts, but don’t get me wrong, our stream isn’t about gluing and pasting macaroni onto a paper plate (but if you can think of a diagnostic that involves gluing and pasting macaroni onto a paper plate, then be my guest).
You may not be familiar with what a DIY diagnostic is, but chances are you’ve seen one. A pregnancy test is a well-known example. You urinate on the stick, and the display screen will alert you if you’re pregnant or not pregnant.You just diagnosed yourself as pregnant or not pregnant by using this test! That, in my opinion, is what I believe makes DIY unique from the others streams because if you come across a problem in real life, you can head back to the lab and make a diagnostic for it. If you’re allergic to nuts, but you don’t want the waiter/waitress to name every ingredient in your dish, you could potentially make a diagnostic that can detect the trace of nuts. How the diagnostic will be work and what it’ll look like is totally up to you. And that’s what I like about this stream, the research you do can be very personal to you, but end up being very helpful to hundreds of people.
A project I worked on this summer involved collecting water at 9 AM for a month, filtering the water, then checking how much E. coli and enterococcus is in the water. To be honest, I woke up every morning wanting to skip lab, but the prospect of being that much closer to creating a working diagnostic motivated me. Whenever people asked me what I did in lab, I always simplified it by saying: “I got water from a creek and checked to see if there was poop in it”. As informal and useless as that sounds, I’m hoping that the research I participated in will help the people in developing countries be certain that they’re drinking clean water.
The stream isn’t always about sitting in a lab and doing experiments to create physical diagnostics. DIY is in the process of making mobile apps that can be accessed on smart phones and laptops! Even though I’m not the most tech savvy person in the world, the coding that I’ve learned in this stream has helped me understand some components of apps and webpages. However, asides from that, working in a lab is a very social and self-developing experience. You learn how to present your work clearly and proudly, you form a bond with your lab mates through the countless hours of struggling, and you learn how to communicate ideas to others. Working in a lab is a very humbling and gratifying experience that I believe is important to experience at least once in your life.