After 8 weeks of my very first research experience, I cannot believe how much I’ve learned. Outside of academics, I had a chance to interact with my PI one on one, met and learned how to get along with people, and also got a taste of what my passion might be. To be honest, I still have no idea what I want to do for my career. I liked the idea of my research topic – what was it about aerobic exercise that somehow prevented the deleterious effects of whole brain irradiation? How did voluntary running have anything to do with maintenance of memory? It was cool to explore these ideas by hands-on experience, and getting great results was also rewarding. But I felt like there needed to be much more explorings to do; the questions could be so specific in research, and after getting a taste of neuroscience research, it felt like I would be able to find my passion/genuine interest in a branch of neuroscience.
Before this program, I was interested and wanted to decide between getting a PhD in neuroscience or a dental degree. For unknown reasons, neuroscience is a natural fascination to me, which I knew starting from my senior year in high school when I took AP Psych class. There was a huge unit on neuroscience, and something about the mixture of psychology and biology and explaining behaviors through physiology/biology seemed like an extremely interesting mix. And as for the interest in dentistry, frankly, the path was set as a ‘default’, and before the start of this program, I told myself “If I decide that I like doing research over the summer, I’ll go with the neuroscience PhD plan. If not, dentistry it is.” But things got a little bit more complicated than that. As I was working in Dr. Williams’ lab, I found research very likely to be my future career. I like research in that I can get my questions answered (or make a progress in obtaining the answer) by some creativity. I also like the thrill of becoming the first in the world to find out/discover a fact that no one else knew before. And I like it in that the findings could have the potential to help other people in clinical settings. However, I realized that to take this path, and for any other paths really, I would need passion, an internal drive purely from my interest, not for the sake of financial stability or becoming a renown scientist. Having experienced a field of neuroscience research, I want to find my interest, some idea/field that would make me genuinely excited and driven. And to find out if I really belong in the neuroscience research career or not, I decided that I would have to explore and try out other neuroscience areas.
There are many ways to help other people and do great things and earn a lot of money, but if I don’t enjoy it, what’s the point? The past 8 weeks has left me with a great determination – explore! I guess when I thought about dentistry, I wanted to take the easy way out; I wanted some kind of stability, an unchanging goal that would make me feel like I was moving forward toward something. Don’t get me wrong, dentistry is a great profession and I do have some interest in the area – working with my fingers, fixing things, and helping people are all attractive ideas to me. And I’m actually going to try out some research as I do some shadowing for dentists too, to see if I can see my future self in either of those positions. But before I decide for sure, I want to do plenty of exploring so I would passionately enjoy what I do and also have no regrets with what I decide.
I would like to thank everyone who helped me find my determination to explore. I would also like to expecially thank everyone in the Howard Hughes Program and for the generous opportunity that I had over the summer. It’s the end of the program, but it’s also the start of my exploration! Let the journey begin!
