Good evening Internet!
It’s been a crazy and challenging week. Honestly, a month ago I had no idea what to expect when it came to working in a lab. Would I be observing animal behavior? Humans? Fish? Flies? Would I be hunched over a lab bench pipetting late into the night? Lab research is so fantastically varied and I considered myself lucky to get a placement working in Dr Jennifer Groh’s lab studying Cognitive Neuroscience.
She and I met during the summer to discuss the experiment I would spend at least two months pursuing. Her excitement was contagious. “I actually have this new project,” she said, “it’s just out of the planning stages but we’re trying to figure out, by tracking motor learning, how the brain masters a piece of music.” As a musician and aspiring scientist, that idea fell smack dab in the middle of my two passions, so I couldn’t resist the thought of being given a long leash and little instruction, combined with the pressure of problem solving every step of the way.
I know this kind of project is going to test me on how quickly I can adapt and learn. I have absolutely no current experience with MatLab, for example, which I’ll need to write programs and analyze data. This kind of project is going to test me on how fast I can recover from setbacks. As I’ve already found out, things don’t always go according to plan and it’s constantly necessary to make adaptations, which will keep the experiment moving towards an end result. This project will put me in scenarios that require teamwork. A lot of lab work is collaborative, utilizing the combined minds of a dedicated group rather than trying to tackle problems alone.
Which brings me to the real question we were posed for this blog entry: what do you expect to get out of the Howard Hughes program? I see Howard Hughes as a chance to explore a potential career direction in research. Like many of my peers I still have no real idea what I want to do with my life, whether it be scientific or musical or something else entirely. These next two months are an opportunity to grow as a learner, problem solver and maybe even innovator in a scientific field. I very much expect that, whatever shape the summer takes, I’ll have learned a great deal about myself. Hopefully, this is just the start of a journey that will continue beyond the program’s two-month span and into the rest of my life.
Wilson
