My Internship

One of my main talents is my willingness to learn. My lab is heavily based on biomedical enginneering which is something I have never studied before. By tapping into my prior knowledge from earlier classes, I can draw connections from my past neuroscience and calculus classes and apply that to the lab work. Since my background is different than the other people working in my lab, I can also bring a new perspective to the table. 

The internship relies on a biomedical engineering background; however, there is a heavy emphasis on neuroscience. I have been trying to fit in my neuroscience background into my internship, by doing research on different structures in the rat brain and spinal cord. I have also been helping out on the operant conditioning side, and using my neuroscience background to understand the goal of the research.  My internship allows for application of different neuroscience techniques, such as operant conditioning, that I have only read about before. By watching it in action, and seeing the decision making that the rats have to do has caused me to gain a further understanding of the application of operant conditioning. As I have progressed through my neuroscience classes and through my data science minor, I can see a heavy connection with this internship and the classes I am taking. I am applying the programming knowledge I have learned in the lab to my data science classes, and am understanding meaningful applications to understand the brain pathways in my neuroscience classes.

I am the only LHSI intern at my lab, but being able to work with my teammates and coworkers has been a really helpful experience for me. All of them are all still in school and are all at different points in life. Some of them are finishing up master's degrees, others PhD's, and some medical school. Learning about their journeys has been really beneficial for me to understand where I would like to see myself in the upcoming years and how I can use my education to my advantage in the workplace. When I started working, I expected the work to move a lot faster. However, research is an ongoing process and it can take a long time to obtain the data you want and to teach the rats the experiment. An issue we have come across is sometimes the rats unlearn what has been taught to them, so the time of the experiment doubles, and it can feel like we are moving backwards rather than forwards. 

As an intern I have found many successes in being able to understand the goal of the research being performed. One of my biggest points is that I came into this internship with very little background in biomedical engineering. Being able to understand what we were looking at by fluctuating the CV in the operant conditioning experiments was a big "win" for me. At the beginning of the year I was incredibly overwhelmed with how much I just didn't know about the experiments, and all of my coworkers seemed to be experts. I have been able to come to a point where I understand what is being discussed in the lab, and I feel like an adequate helper as well. To get to this point, I had to start with the basics to understand what the point of the CV was, and look into the basic coding of MATLab. The coding of MATLab was quite complex for me having no coding background, so that is still a work in progress, but I am feeling more confident in the structure of the experiments themselves. After a year, I have found a lot of success in completing the operant conditioning experiments on my own. I help the rats understand how to identify different CVs under a specific frequency. I have also been learning how to handle animal models in the lab, and how to acclimate them to the experimental setting. I have also been having a lot of success in the lab meetings; by learning about other people's research I have been able to connect the internship back to my classes at a higher level. This helps me see the importance in my research and become more passionate about it. 

My success is more of a double edged sword, and was also the most challenging part of my experience. Like I said above, there were times when my coworkers were talking about portions of the experiment, or specific aspects of what we were looking at, and I found myself completely lost. I wanted to be helpful, and I felt bad about asking so many questions for clarification purposes. This also led to me feeling guilty, because I needed to go back and relearn the basics of the experiment before I could even consider independence on running the experiments by myself. As the semester progressed, I became less wary of asking questions,  because through those questions I can further my understanding and be more helpful in the lab. I also started to stop feeling as guilty about my lack of independence in the experiments, because it can take a lot of time to grasp especially when I am working with live specimen. There are a lot of rules to follow and I have been greatly appreciative of having someone there with me to help me understand how to run the operant conditioning on the rats. After a year, I can confidently say my internship team has been so supportive with overcoming my setbacks. They have helped me in debugging the code in MATLab and learn the basics of Python. They have given me more insight on the different brain-spine pathways, and taught me so much more about the importance of this research in advancing the field of spinal stimulation. Whenever I am confused, I feel comfortable shooting a quick text or a Slack message to my coworkers and they are always ready to help me learn more. They are always open to answer my questions and offer different ways to overcome a problem.