Coming into this program a week ago, I had no concrete idea of what to expect from the next 2 months, which seemed to me the best way to maximize my experience here and hopefully minimize the disappointments encountered. After this past week, this approach appears to have been largely ineffective– I have inevitably come across some challenges (particularly in the kitchen, where I was faced with the unpleasant fact that frying a sausage at medium heat will result in a charred outside and mostly raw innards). However, a week with my lab (the Hariri Lab) has presented me with a clearer view of what I can expect the rest of my summer to look like, though I fully anticipate more unexpected obstacles to crop up in the meantime.
As this is my first time researching in a lab, I will admit that most of my preconceived notions of working in a scientific lab have been heavily influenced by Hollywood depictions of scientists fervently running gels in their labs after midnight surrounded by vials and beakers or even that scene in the movie Interstellar where Matthew Mcconaughey’s daughter screams Eureka and throws all her papers in the air after filling up like 15 chalkboards with equations. So when I met up with my secondary mentor in my lab, Johnna, in May, I was a little thrown off when she said that the lab did not do any wet lab tasks— as a neurogenetics lab, they send saliva samples collected to California for genome mapping and consequently keep all information in a huge database. Thus, most of the work done at the lab is mostly analytical and computational, with much of the thinking concentrated in the initial step of deciding what gene or SNP is most interesting, and by what mechanism it affects behavior. This was perhaps the most important lesson of this week for me: realizing that science is not made less valid if you’re not getting your hands dirty and learning how to use an autoclave– instead, it is about the questions you ask and understanding all of the necessary steps behind, hopefully, advancing toward an answer.
So instead of listing all of my expectations for this program, which will surely be disproven or rendered invalid as they have in this past week, I’ll aim to describe a few of my hopes for the next 7 weeks. First, like many others, I hope that this experience will provide me with a better, even if tiny, idea of whether I could potentially pursue scientific research throughout the rest of my undergrad years or even as a career. I want to know if neuroscience is just as exciting up close as it is in class (no pressure it’s just that I found out I’m taking my PI’s class next semester), and of course I hope to learn as much as I can about the jargon, the technical skills, and the knowledge surrounding this area of research. Outside of the lab, I hope that by the end of the summer session my legs will no longer feel like jello after riding my bike to French Family, that my sausages will eventually be cooked all the way through, and that I will have gotten to know my fellow fellows better among many other things.
