About Me

Qualities of a Good Team Member

Communication, etiquette, kindness, responsibility, accountability, and perseverance are some of the qualities of a good team member that I have.

Personal Strengths

I'm an international student from Mexico and I'm fluent in Spanish and know basic French. My strengths include initiative, resilience, determination and curiosity. Despite the difficulties I always keep going and try to find solutions to the problems I encounter.

Experiences

The summer before my senior in high school, I participated in Project SEED under Dr. Yokota. My project consisted in raising two breast cancer cells lines and identifying their differences by performing immunoblotting and wound heal scratch assay. This program also introduced me to cell culture technique. My senior year I also participated in an internship at the Glick Eye Institute, which consisted of a literature review of cataract incidence in women compared to men. I am currently participating in an internship at the Glick Eye Institute through LHSI. I will be working under Ashay Bhatwadekar on a project about diabetic retinopathy.

Areas for Improvement

I think I should work on my confidence and my self-discipline. I often doubt or second-guess myself whenever I think about the results of an action I performed. I tend to look for the mistakes and make it more understandable. I also struggle with expressing myself. I can express myself better through emails or written texts rather than presentations or group meetings. I think a solution for me would be writing down the key points that I want to cover and practice what I want to say with someone else before a meeting. Self-discipline is hard for me, especially at home, but I think that setting up a schedule and with practice I'll get better at it and will learn how to be more productive.

Type of Team Member

I tend to work independently but I will ask other members for help and will help if someone asks me to. I like to solve problems and misunderstandings and will often ask for a clarification or suggest ideas. I don't tend to be a leader unless during class activities when no one takes the lead. I like to be an asset rather than leading a group of people.

Growth as a Professional

This internship has been more challenging that the ones I had in the past. It was more independent and I encountered more obstacles such as my cells dying without me knowing why and figuring out what planimetry method to use. I also made small mistakes that ended up affecting the results of my experiments, which I had to repeat. This internship made me put in practice many scientific attitudes such as patience, acceptance of results, perseverance and reflection. It taught me that making mistakes is something common during scientific procedures, and how to avoid those mistakes by writing down all procedures done and observations.

Even the infrastructure of the building had an impact on how I saw scientific research in society; the first floor of the Glick Eye Institute had a clinic where I would see patients walking in while the rest of the floors where laboratories and offices. I also got the opportunity to observe how these hard working scientists directly contributed to the vision health of patients. Sometimes I had to check on my cells at night or take a picture of them for scratch wound healing assay. I noticed that most of the professionals in the building worked from 9am to 5pm, but often I saw other people in the laboratories next to me performing an experiment. I felt inspired by this and felt happy that I was doing work similar to them (not as complex, but similar). This internship inspired me to be a hard working and dedicated professional, and I would be happy to get my PhD in biochemistry if I cannot enroll in medical school and work there or at a similar place.

Career Interests

My career interests include becoming a physician or a biochemist working in a laboratory related to medicine or physiology. I'm also interested in orthopedic surgery, ophthalmology, and oncology. I aspire to be the best physician that I can be.

Professionalism in Action

Given that this semester I am taking rigorous courses and working a part-time job besides my internship, one time I had to perform a wound healing assay which takes about 10 hours to complete. Since I had been busy with school and my job, I decided to run the procedure a Saturday morning. I do not drive and my parents worked on that day, so I stayed until the evening at the lab performing the experiment by myself. I found the procedure to be tiring but I prepared myself for that day and produced good results.