Success and Challenges

Over the 10 months of my Internship, this is my success story

The helpful team I have gotten a chance to work with, from communication to supporting one another in the lab. This has played an eminent role in my growth at the workplace

Understanding how cell culture works: In the beginning, I struggled with understanding how each phase/step lined up. But over the Spring 2022 semester, I started the growth curve experiment where I successfully learned how to observe changes and understand the growing capacity of cells.

This is simple and easy, but I learned the importance of sterile environments and pippetting techniques, this has led me to succeed not only in the lab but also in my classes for example my Cell and tissue Lab that deals with similar techniques that I gained in my lab.

Over the 10 months of my Internship, these are some of the challenges that I encountered in my lab:

The biggest difficulty and stepping stone I faced was consistency in the experiments, every week was a new experiment for me as the cells grew in their own timelines, hence accustoming to the cell lines and understanding growth patterns was what helped me later to run a successful experiment

In the mid of my internship, my lab moved, and hence getting the cell line start-up, arranging the lab, and making sure everything was functioning under sterile environments was the most challenging part. But I overcame this by helping my lab and compiling data and results collected previously. Moreover, I also learned how to set up a hood, vacuum, cell counter, incubator in general!