Final Entry

Spending the last 10 weeks in the Lemke Lab has enabled me to learn a great deal. In the beginning I spent a lot of time training and watching how to complete tasks. As the summer progressed I became more and more able to do things on my own. I definitely still asked a lot of questions because I wanted to make sure I did everything correctly. While precision is very important in science, I also learned that perfection can be the enemy of good enough. For example, when working with some sample I might spend too much time making sure everything looks perfect and the samples might dry out as a result. However, many of the techniques I performed numerous times and each time I got better at balancing perfection with efficiency. I was also able to focus less on the individual steps and more on the overall picture of the experiment.

I spent most of my time over the past 10 weeks isolating RNA, converting it to cDNA in order to use it in a qPCR. The isolation step I quickly improved my techniques, set up and efficiency. After analyzing my RNA I also discovered some of my samples had degraded and therefore learned the hard way which steps I could leave the RNA overnight at and which I could not. When converting the RNA to cDNA through reverse transcription, I had to understand what was happening in the reaction in order to know which reagent to put in at the right step (once by accident I added dNTP instead of oligo(dT) to RNA, which meant there were just a bunch of extra nucleic acids floating around instead of the primer which targets poly(A)+RNA). Loading the 384-well plates for the qPCR taught me attention to detail more than anything else.

Pipetting very small volumes of different reagents into every single well can be difficult to keep track of. In the last couple weeks, my work has shifted more to analysis of all the data that this process produced. It was only with help that I was able to do all the averages, standards deviations and normalizations, making me realize that I should probably take statistics at some point in my college career. This enabled me to work with a software application called Prism, which takes data after it has been analyzed and creates very good and informative graphs.
I’m not sure if this summer has altered my view necessarily of the STEM fields. If anything though, it has strengthened my belief that STEM fields are integral to our country and future. The work of other scientists across the globe continues to emphasize this point. Perhaps the most dramatic example from this summer would be the scientists you have created an Ebola vaccine that efficiently functions in a monkey model. Scientists have the ability to save and better the lives of humanity through strengthening bodies and the Earth.
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The program here at the Salk Institute is an excellent example of just that. It enables researchers to interact with their community and show young people exactly what they are doing, why they are doing it and most importantly why the students might like to do it too. I hope that other research institutes around the country are able to start similar programs across the country. In certain areas, like here in San Diego, it seems extremely feasible that if all the researchers took one day out of the year to visit a classroom that most of the classrooms in the county would be better exposed to science.

In the future, I plan to build upon what I have learned this summer by applying the techniques I have learned to different questions and areas of research. Having this experience will show other principal investigators that I am capable of learning new techniques and effectively analyzing the data that they produce. Hopefully, I will eventually gain even more autonomy in the lab so that by graduate school I will feed confident in conducting my own research. I also help to be able to always remember the education program here at Salk so that wherever I may end up working I can bring that idea with me.

Here, I am isolating RNA. I have to work in the hood because the chemical I am pipetting is very hazardous.

Here I am filling my multichannel pipet with cDNA from a 96 well plate in order to then put it in a 384 well plate where a qPCR will be performed.