Don’t you have the moments that are so coincidental that they don’t seem coincidental? Where it seems instead as if someone is trying to tell you something?
Dr. Hunt Willard spoke about such moments when discussing how he became involved in researching X chromosome inactivation. His advisor was late to meet him, and he was waiting when he stumbled on an article about X chromosome inactivation. Not long before this, he had heard about this phenomenon in his biology class, and this article flamed his fascination. Maybe he did not know it at the time but Dr. Willard had discovered the direction of his career in that article.
I believe in such moments, but I have yet to feel that pull from a specific research topic. There are many research topics that excite me, and this summer I have become much surer that I love microbiology. Yet microbiology is a broad field. I have asked the graduate students in the lab where I am interning, how did you become interested in inflammation? Or why do you use a mouse model when there are other models? I have tried to ask a lot of questions, and the students in my lab give satisfyingly long answers.
But their answers cannot be mine. From Dr. Willard, all the faculty that have presented, and the graduate students in my lab, I have heard how people become interested in science. I have to discover my own interests. I know that I’m a cause-driven person, which means I struggle to be motivated when I don’t see how the science can be applied to benefit living creatures. Tony Piro, one of my mentors this summer, has been incredibly helpful in this regard – he is also cause-driven and points out the applications of the science to me.
With such help, time, and effort, I am hoping to have my “Eureka!” moment soon, where I discover the scientific question that absorbs me. I can see myself working tirelessly to answer such a question because Theodore Roosevelt had it right, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
