My Goals

My Internship Goals

Goal #1: Develop personal professionalism by demonstrating professional communication and contributing to the success of the lab.

I will work on this goal by conducting essential lab experiments and working with other lab personnel. Additionally, I attend each weekly lab meeting with the goal of asking at least one question per meeting.

Goal #2: Incorporate frequently used research techniques into my internship experience.

I will be using common DNA cloning techniques throughout my internship. I will also be performing various lab duties, such as autoclaving waste and preparing buffer solutions. These skills are applicable to most research labs.

Goal #3: Compare, discuss, and explain important practices that produce integrable science in a research setting

I will be reading relevant reports and published papers to learn more about the parasite's biology and to observe the structure of such documents. I will also be reporting what I learn back to the members of the lab during lab meetings to practice this communication.

My Career Goals

While I am still deciding what my future career in medicine will be, I have been using this internship as an opportunity to see what graduate school is like. The health sciences is dynamic and rewarding, which is what drew me to the field. I have found that I enjoy the work in a lab, I often look forward to my internship each week.

I enjoy learning and discussing science with my mentors, which is a skill I would like to use in my future career. This connects well with my first internship goal. A career as a leader in the medical or health science field would allow me to make these connections and have these discussions to make meaningful contributions to the field.

Observing and participating in the process of scientific advancement has been an enlightening experience. As I continue to pursue my second internship goal, I will be closer to working independently on experiments. This will also allow me to troubleshoot and design experiments, which are essential skills to the scientific field.

The longer I work in the lab, the more I realize that my final internship goal is actually a combination of the previous two. To discover valuable science, two things are needed: understanding the theory and applying it to reality. By continuing my work at the Absalon Lab, I hope to grow in both of these capacities for my future career.

How LHSI Influenced my Goals

As I continued on my path through the LHSI program, my goals became more clear. My future career will still be related to medical science, but my path to getting there has been more illuminated. Being surrounded by an incredible and encouraging lab team has helped me recognize a passion for pharmacology.