I don’t know what I want to do with my life; I’ve always been that type of person. So when it came to picking a research stream for the Freshman Research Initiative, I was totally lost. What if I picked a stream and then ended up hating what I did? What if it was boring or too hard? There was everything from fish behavior to quantum computing, but those were too specific for me it felt like I could never truly find something I would want to do. That’s until I saw DIY Diagnostics. Intrigued by the name, I did further research on the internet and saw that DIY Diagnostics that was simply a stream based around creating cheap, at-home tests for anything from the environment to diseases. It was the only stream that I saw that focused on chemistry, biology, and computer science at the same time. Intrigued, I decided to go to the FRI Open House event and check out the DIY Diagnostics booth, and oh man was I impressed. There’s something unexplainably charismatic about Dr. Riedel, the stream research educator, waving a pregnancy test around and talking about it being an end goal for the stream that just gets me hooked on the idea of self-diagnostics. From that day on, I knew that DIY Diagnostics was where I wanted to be. I really thought I would be doing something biology related when I joined FRI. Instead, my project is entirely electronics and coding based, and I LOVE IT! I had never coding or put electronics together before I came to DIY Diagnostics, but being exposed to so many different things in such a diverse stream helps you really figure out what you want to do. I’ve done everything from water quality analysis, to web app coding in this stream, and I’ve loved every moment of it.