BSURF began this week and throughout the week I’ve been thinking about what my ultimate goal was. I was thinking about what exactly I want to get out of my experience.
One of my dreams is to come up with my own research and maybe get published one day. I am hoping that this experience will give me more of an idea of how to go about doing that. How to think of an idea, design a way to collect evidence for my hypothesis and then figure out the tools I need to conduct my experiment.
So far I have learned so many things in my week already. I’ve learned how to score experiments, put rats through experiments, I have learned how to even perform some surgeries. But I think one of the most important things I have learned so far is that research is a very slow process that requires a lot of patience. Research and finding new information is sexy but in order to get to that sexy part, you have to do some of the not-so-sexy things.
You have to spend time feeding the rats, weighing and marking their tails, and cleaning out their poopy cages. You have to spend time figuring out which rats to move into separate cages if they don’t seem to be striving with other rats in their cages. You have to be okay with getting bitten sometimes when you’re taking the rats out of cages to conduct the experiments. You might even be peed and pooped on a couple of times. However, all these things are necessary in order to make new discoveries. I am very excited to see what other things I learn.
