“She may be wearing blue, but she’s green,” chuckled my primary mentor Dr. Marc Caron as he introduced me to the lab PI, Larry Barak, and my secondary mentor Joshua Snyder. Its true, I am green. That is to say I’m completely new to doing research. As someone who hopes to pursue a career in pharmacological research this is an embarrassing admission, kind of like saying that you want to do a triathlon but you don’t know how to ride a bike. How can I say with any certainty that I want to do research if I have no idea what real research is like? My hope is that by the end of these next eight weeks I will have a better understanding of what the life of a researcher entails, and whether I am actually suited for that life.
The classroom labs in the FFSC are the only labs I’ve ever set foot in, so honestly I didn’t know what to expect when I first arrived in the Caron lab this past Monday morning. As I was shown around I was struck by how naive and young I felt, like a six-year old on the first day of school. At nineteen years of age that’s a rare feeling for me, but it was thrilling. Just imagine all that I have to learn, not just about the actual research, but also about the finer details like the lab hierarchy, who gets to take on what projects,and how money is allotted.
I guess I must’ve expected everyone to be serious and silent, mechanically running experiments in solitude, because I was initially confused by how relaxed and talkative everyone was. There are these chalkboards on the walls of one of the main hallways in the lab, and routinely during the week they would be used by one of the researchers to explain a concept or idea to me or a coworker. I suppose this is how compelling ideas grow into fully funded research projects. Scientists don’t come up with big research projects all on their own, instead they bounce ideas off of one another. I’m quickly beginning to realize that science is a social process. Scientists exist within a close-knit community and their work and ideas are almost always collaborative. I witnessed this in the lab as Josh, Larry, or another researcher would spontaneously take up a piece of chalk and begin drawing a diagram in the middle of describing some unique phenomenon or interesting discovery. I hope that by the end of these next eight weeks I too will have a couple ideas of my own that I can share on those chalkboards.
But before I can formulate ideas of my own, I realize that first I need to do a lot of reading. And, this first week, that’s basically all I’ve done. Read. And read. And read. Everything from scientific papers to textbooks to Wikipedia articles. Coming into this program, I didn’t realize how much I would need to learn about methods, procedures, and the general research language before I can even get my hands dirty doing cell cultures, transfecting cells, or performing a PCR. At first I was a completely overwhelmed by all that was being thrown at me. I’m only now just beginning to grasp the idea behind my research project. However, by the end of this summer I expect to be able to not only explain my research project in a clear and concise way, but also to hopefully come up with ideas for new research projects that build off of my current research project.
For now though, I’ll try to enjoy this sensation of being a little kid again instead of becoming frustrated by my lack of experience. I may be green now, but come the end of the summer and I hope to be a well-conditioned, fully experienced researcher. By then I should not only have a strong background in the field of research, but also have established roots in the scientific community that will nourish me for the rest of my career as a researcher.
