Every career has a decent amount of communication needed for success, and I aim to be able to clearly state things with peers and superiors in a professional manner. To achieve this goal, I will meet with my supervisor regularly, collaborate with other members in the lab, and keep an open and consistent line of communication.

I want to broaden my experience as much as possible, thus, I hope to be able to learn how to conduct behavioral tests and molecular assays within my cite. To achieve this goal, I will be fully attentive when being trained on things, review protocol often to ensure accuracy, and repeat the tasks numerous times to become more comfortable with them

I want to be able to reliably complete tasks in the lab on my own as well as understand the purpose of the tasks I’m completing in relation to the “bigger picture”. To achieve this goal, I will research the types of behaviors we are doing to see how they apply, ask questions to better understand the results we see, and draw my own conclusions and compare with other, more experienced members.  

The Lukkes lab has a lot of moving parts and projects going on at the same time, which forces us to all communicate actively and work together to successfully complete tasks. This has allowed me to feel confident in my ability to work with other members of the lab and my supervisor. A new goal that can be added into this is the ability to communicate with people outside of my own lab, to further build my network. 

I am able to complete most of the behavioral tasks independently. Now, I am able to understand the underlying mechanisms related to the behaviors we are running and am able to train and explain them to others. However, I aim to better manage my time in lab so that I am not spending all of my time stuck on one task and can allocate my time better and complete more tasks in less time. This shows my progress in understanding the "big picture" of the research, which is becoming much easier to understand the more I get involved in. By being able to participate in all the moving parts, I can see what the impact of each part is. 

For the summer, I am aiming to learn new wet lab skills in the REU I am participating in while also furthering my ability to network with other professionals in the field of neuroscience. These tie into my career goals because I aim to become a research scientist in either academia (alongside teaching and mentoring) or industry, which require a lot of networking, communication, and laboratory skills. By gaining more experiences in different labs while also having a long-term project, I am allowing myself to become a more desirable candidate for graduate school programs. 

Looking ahead, my goals following my undergraduate studies is to pursue a graduate program centering on neuroscience. Although I am not sure which specific aspect of the field I want to study, but my internship experience here has allowed me to explore the world of addiction neuroscience. With my majors, I am focusing a lot on the brain and how it works and I want to continue pursuing research in this area of science because there is so much we still don't know much about the brain and I want to be apart of a team that is working to further our understanding. When considering possible options after a possible graduate program, I aspire to become a research professor at a university so I can both pursue research and help educate and support the future generations of scientists. 

Some of the skills that I am using the most so far are related to communication and teamwork. The Lukkes lab has a lot of moving parts and projects going on at the same time, which forces us to all communicate actively and work together to successfully complete tasks. This has allowed me to feel confident in my ability to work with other members of the lab and my supervisor. 

I am still working on being more independent in the lab. I am unable to complete certain tasks fully on my own due to some of my training not being complete until later this month, but I plan to strive for more independence as soon as I am able to. 

An existing strength I am building on is my ability to critically problem solve when things don't go exactly the way we wanted. When working with rodents on behavioral paradigms, there is plenty of room for little errors that need to be observed and noted, but I feel like I am getting better at understanding how these challenges do or don't impact our results in the long run. 

My internship has allowed me to directly transport myself into my coursework and allows me to experience neuroscience research firsthand. I am still learning about some of the wet-lab assays we use to analyze specific regions of the brain, but learning about the surgeries we conduct with the Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) experimental model has helped me further understand some of the neurocircuitry as a whole. 

One skill that I am more confident on that during the fall is my ability to critically analyze the results of the behavioral assays we are running. Initially, I knew the goal of running the behaviors, but I was unsure what the results communicated. Now, I am able to look at some of the values and results we are getting and connect meaning to them. 

One skill I am still working on from the survey is solving problems independently. Although I am now much more experienced in planning and executing tasks, I still feel like I am asking for help quite a bit when I run into problems. There isn't an issue with that, but being able to fully solve these altercations on my own and have the results checked would be a good way to further progress for me. This would allow me to build on my strengths in problem-solving that I have been using to better grasp all of the new tasks I have learned to complete independently. 

An additional aspect of my internship experience that has begun tying into my coursework is the analysis of the adverse effects social isolation can have on alcohol use. In my Drugs and Behavior class, we have discussed some of the social factors that can increase one's risk for developing AUDs, which directly connects to the model we are using in the Lukkes Lab.