First and foremost the opportunities to glimpse what research is like in BSURF were plentiful. We heard talks from revolutionary scientists and trailblazers, read countless papers, and presented our work in a variety of methods. These activities revealed examples of the larger picture of life as a scientist: asking questions and discovering answers. This picture of science has only made research more compelling and exciting.
I cannot begin to express my gratitude for Bel, my mentor for the summer. Her exuberance and brilliance will forever baffle me, and I was fortunate enough to observe both her techniques and thought processes in working to answer her hypothesis. With immense help from Bel, I have acquired some technical lab skills as well as some insight into how to communicate science. BSURF has afforded us with invaluable practice in communicating our work, from talking with fellow BSURFers, giving a brief pitch which one might do in an interview, to creating and presenting a scientific poster. Apart from revealing the shortcomings of Powerpoint, creating and then presenting a poster was a very real yet very minuscule experience of moving science forward, that ended up looking like a few members of the Eroglu lab congregating around my poster to exchange ideas.
In these eight weeks I have found research to involve slow unsuccessful projects. Since I don’t know enough to formulate questions or work on finding answers, I only experienced a microcosm of scientific research. The big picture of what it means to do research is what is the most meaningful and what I want to do. BSURF has cemented this goal in my mind and I am excited to keep working towards it.
