About me
I am a junior who is majoring biomedical engineering and minoring in mathematics. I choose this major because it connects math with medicine. Since I was young, I wanted to become an engineer and eventually once I got into high school, I became interested in medicine so biomedical engineering was a perfect major for me.
Teamwork
My current strengths as a team member are reliability, responsiveness, and commitment. I constantly hold myself accountable for my actions i.e. finishing projects on time and making sure everything is being communicated correctly.
What my previous experiences taught me about being a team member is that communication is the most fundamental aspect of being a great team leader. Someone can not be a leader, be responsible, or be respectful if they cannot communicate properly. Working on school group projects made me a better team worker since it forced me to communicate with my lab mates or take charge if things were not getting completed.
My role as a team member changed throughout the course of this year. When I first came to the lab, I was not able to perform any task by myself and had to ask questions about the studies. As time went on, I became more independent and was able to perform tasks by myself. Since I am the only undergraduate student in the lab, I cannot teach others what I have learned, but if I was given the opportunity I would be able to do it now. I am more professional but at the same time, my coworkers and I have gotten closer to each other and developed more of a friendship.
My Experiences and Skills
Meijer: I worked at Meijer as a produce stocker from 2021-2022 during the summers and on the weekends during the academic year. I learned how to communicate better about problems or solutions I had which made my overall workday better and more productive. Working as a produce stocker offered some additional challenges such as time management and customer service. Time management was important since as a worker you must be able to realize how long stocking certain shelves took and how quickly the shelves got depleted. My time management at the beginning was not good which caused certain shelves to be overstocked while others shelves would be understocked. Providing great customer service was important to my overall performance as a worker since it would either lead to a customer coming back or never coming back again.
Student Athlete: My role in swimming either in club or high school swimming was being a leader. My coach talked to me individually about how to become a better leader by being more vocal and setting a good example at all times. This meant I took more responsibility for my actions and held myself to a higher standard. Throughout my 10 years of competitive swimming, I also gained experience involving time management since I was training twice a day 5-6 times a week while being an involved student in my high school. Since I understand the consequences of procrastinating, I now have the ability to handle more things during my academic career.
Throughout these specific experiences and other experiences, I have gained certain skills and strengths I enjoy while others I do not enjoy. Most of the time I like to be the leader of groups or at least have more imprint on groups goals. I also enjoy using problem-solving skills that I have learned throughout the years as a student. I find great satisfaction in figuring out a solution to a problem. I particularly do not enjoy multi-tasking to the extent that nothing gets done. I'd much rather focus on a couple of projects that get completed relatively quickly than do dozens of projects that take years to get done.
Some new strengths I have gained are more technical skills within the lab setting. I can take images using a microCT scanner, then prepare the raw images for cTAN which is a software that analyzes the different properties of bones. I can also use histomorphology techniques to quantify bone formation rates. I still need to grow in the writing portion of research since that takes a special skill to produce well-written studies. Besides LHSI, I have also grown as a better labmate since I have been in dozens of group projects over the years of my undergraduate. I communicate more properly and get my tasks done before the due dates.
New skills/strengths
Some new skills and strengths I developed over the last semester were coding and perseverance. Last semester was by far my hardest semester so I had to dig deep and until I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. There were also a lot of individual projects that all required MATLAB (coding software) so I became much better at coding by practice and trial/error.