As I reflect on my lab experience in the past 6 weeks, I remember how I was challenged to go above and beyond the call of duties, but most importantly how I love what I’m doing. And that has helped me to overcome one of my biggest challenges which is reading advanced scientific papers.
For the first time in my life, I took my time to read and thoroughly understand several scientific papers about my lab’s research. Reading through papers is something I hardly done. Most of the times I just skimmed through the paper since I always thought I can never understand any advanced paper. But I was wrong. I have learnt that even if it might be hard to understand the methods, I can read other papers about those specific methods and or inquire from the extraordinary scientists at Duke. The past 6 weeks in the lab have made me realize that nothing is hard to achieve when there’s passion. I love my lab, I love the research topics my lab is working on and most importantly, I am passionate about my own research. I have always been passionate about enhancing my knowledge on infectious diseases and I feel privileged to have gotten an opportunity to do research. Where there’s passion, a challenge is seen as an incredible opportunity to learn and achieve great things.
I’m proud of the progress I have made in the lab from reading scientific papers about cryptococcus neoformans to learning how to use most of the lab equipments to understanding my own project. One big challenge I faced while conducting my research was failure of PCR reactions, which led to none or very little amount of DNA bands while doing Gel imaging, but in the end some of them worked out and I was able to proceed. I have positive results of part of my project, but there isn’t enough time to actually complete my project as doing my CSF survival assay for the 3 genes( CNAG_1980, CNAG_00638 and CNAG_00601) that I’m stilling deleting would require atleast additional 2 weeks or so.
