The hardest part of my research experience this summer was settling into the lab. I had very little experience with lab techniques, statistics, or coding before this summer, and even though I knew that I was just learning the basics, it was a lot of new information. I spent the first two weeks practicing the qPCR technique, and although I used the exact same procedure every day, sometimes it turned out perfectly and sometimes I ended up with messy, weird, unexplainable results:
But sometimes I liked troubleshooting. When a certain subset of the 96 wells on the qPCR plate were messed up but the rest were fine, I liked figuring out which step in the procedure could have affected that specific group and none of the others. When my code didn’t work, I liked going back through it and figuring out what exactly I was telling the computer, and why it wasn’t what I intended. It’s nice to see things happen in predictable ways. It’s frustrating, though, when it’s something that I can’t explain at all, and that still happens once in a while.
My favorite part of my summer has been analyzing my data. When I didn’t get the results that I was expecting right away, I had to stop and think about why that might be. Is there a more meaningful way to model social status? Are there other factors that affect mtDNA copy number that I need to control for? Or is there, in reality, not a relationship between these two variables? This part of the process has been much more challenging than my wet-lab work, but it’s also more exciting. People often think of science as such a black-and-white, procedural discipline, but I think it’s also important to be creative, to come up with a ton of ideas and give them all a chance, because sometimes the possibility that you least expect is the one that works.
Another important part of this experience has been getting to know the people in the lab. Since I’m usually with my peers in academic settings, it’s been a little overwhelming to struggle through the basics while everyone else is years ahead of me, but I think it’s a good way to learn very quickly. And these people are all farther along the path that I think I want to follow—the path to a career in research—so I hope to learn from them about what comes next.
