Goals

Learning Goal #1: Learning more about how to become a researcher/ do research.

 How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?

 I aspire to become a cancer researcher and so this is an important goal for me to achieve, so that I may know if this is the right fit for me and so that I may learn how to go about achieving my dream.

What tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities will you do to meet this goal?

1.       Attend research symposiums and events and meet other researchers and professionals.

2.       Participate in writing and peer-reviewing research papers and poster sessions.

3.       Have the opportunity to shadow researchers.

Learning Goal #2: Build on laboratory skills/ experience.

 How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?

 Building the necessary skills for my future career is important. Just knowing how to perform laboratory experiments and analyze and collect data is necessary for a student in science.

What tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities will you do to meet this goal?

1.       Work with older interns in the lab to learn how to carry out experiments.       Reading and gathering the methods of experiment and learning how to carry them out on my own. E.g., following set protocols and guidelines for experiments.

3.       Attending workshops on different laboratory techniques and building knowledge base/ polish skills.

Learning Goal #3: Learn the requirements to get into professional school/make myself a competitive candidate for PhD programs and research programs.

 How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?

 I want to go straight to doing my PhD after my undergraduate degree and I need to learn how to get to that point.

What tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities will you do to meet this goal?

1.       Having meetings with my mentor to discuss pathways for becoming a researcher.

2.       Considering professional degree programs M.D, Ph.D. Seeing their eligibility requirements for international students.

3.       Work on my undergraduate GPA and gain experience, as well as note the application periods and actively research professional schools.

Above I listed three goals I had for my current internship each as in-depth as possible. I started this internship in hopes that It would help me to learn how to become a researcher and do research as that is what I wish for myself in the future. I believe that my experience so far has helped me a lot to build and develop these goals that I had set for myself. 

For Learning Goal #1 I wished to learn more on how to do research/ be a researcher. To achieve this I wanted to get more experience attending research symposiums and events and meet other researchers and professionals. I have succeeded in participating in the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) where I presented my research to many undergraduate students and business professionals from across the United States. I still have two symposiums upcoming that I will be attending and will have the opportunity to capitalize on building this goal. I also wished to participate in writing and peer-reviewing research papers and poster sessions which I have started doing by working on my research abstract and putting together my poster. I have also been working on providing feedback on the projects of others. I also wished to get the opportunity to shadow researchers, which I have not done yet and will work towards doing by having a meeting with my mentor.

 Learning Goal #2 saw me wanting to build on my laboratory/ research skills and I can proudly say that I have been doing so. Each day I get to perform experiments with my peers or on my own and this has helped me to develop a lot of much-needed laboratory skills. It especially helped me to utilize formulas and information learned in my courses over the year in real-life applications, as well as teaching me new formulas and information. As for my research skills, I have been doing online research and attending webinars and workshops about different aspects of research that hopefully see me grow into the best researcher that I can be.

 Finally my in 3rd learning goal I wanted to learn the requirements to get into professional school/make myself a competitive candidate for PhD programs and research programs. I feel like my mentor and fellow senior research students have helped me a lot to understand the requirements for professional school and how to go about searching for schools. I have also been given a lot of sound advice on how to ensure that I am meeting the requirements for professional school here in my undergraduate years. While attending the national conference for undergraduate research I went to a lot of professional school tabling and I gained so much knowledge on the application process and what schools are looking for in candidates. I also learned a lot about finding out what qualities I should be looking for in graduate schools as well which will be invaluable for me in the future when it is time for me to apply for graduate school. It's been an enlightening experience and I believe that by being a part of this internship I was able to develop so much and I feel like I am much closer to attaining my end goal now.

I aspire to become a cancer researcher/ research scientist. To achieve this goal I intend to earn a PhD or if possible an MD/PhD. 

I have always wanted to become a doctor as a child as I wanted to find the cure for cancer. As I got older the more refined that goal got as I became more aware of the exact career that would bring me closer to that desire to find the cure for cancers. I mentioned previously that my goal as a child was to become a doctor, now however I want to do research as that is my vision of how I would be able to study cancer and possibly cure it. I love working in the lab and doing research however a part of me still wonders if I should go to med school and start my research journey later. I stick with my goal to become a researcher however because I feel like I belong more in a lab than dealing with patients and doing surgeries. There is still a curious part of me that wonders if I could do both and as such I am keeping myself open to MD/PhD options. 

To figure out if this is the career option for me I plan to add shadowing doctors or take scribing options to see if maybe I would want to go to med school. As for the research options, I feel like I would want to do research more but I will continue trying to do research internships, attend symposiums and meet new researchers as there might be a more clear picture of what I am to do. 

As with many undergraduate students in the world, I have reached the point in my life where I am at a crossroads, or rather I am confused. I have always seen myself as determined and having it together but I must admit that I have to keep growing. 

My internship has taught me so much about research and how to be a researcher. It has been very challenging but also very rewarding. At times I question whether I truly want to be a researcher and at times my determination wavers, however, if I try hard enough and keep focused I know I will achieve my goal. 

I have not yet had the opportunity to shadow doctors or participate in scribing to see if I would like to be a doctor instead of a researcher, however, I will try to get that opportunity in the summer by reaching out to physicians that I have interacted with previously. 

I truly believe that I would like to be a research scientist instead of a doctor but I feel as if being a physician is a more secure job as doctors go through med school and learn to be a doctor as well as other parts of their training but after that period they are doctors and they are free to practice their work. Researchers however have to get grant funding and other options to run their lab and they have to produce research papers and updated research each year to keep being funded, it just does not seem like a secure job and that is my biggest concern.

 I still wish to become a researcher so I believe I should keep going and work towards it so that In time I will either find the risk worth it or do something else.

I have many goals, some that I have achieved, others I am still working on, and some that I just haven't realized as goals yet. It is really hard to decide on your goals and how to achieve them but I believe that with diligence you can achieve anything. To continue working on my goals I wish to do the following:

• Participate in continued research during my undergraduate years. Through other internship opportunities, networking etc.

• Finish my current research project, I intend to participate in DS_UROP this summer to gain funding to finish my current research with my mentor.

• Reach out to current physicians, I work in the Simon cancer center in the Susan G Komen tissue bank, where I do a lot of volunteer events where I work with surgeons to do breast biopsies on tissue donors. I will use this connection to ask physicians for an opportunity to shadow their work.

• Continue to work out my goals and future decisions. I will do this by attending advising sessions, doing my own research online and considering all the steps above.

• The skill I am more confident in is receiving Constructive criticism/feedback. I say this because this internship experience for me is one where I want to learn a lot so that I may prepare for a future career in research and so I have been learning so much by doing and receiving feedback on the things I have been doing and using this knowledge to work on getting better. I feel like the feedback  I receive helps me not only in my lab work but in my assignments for class, and my lab reports I have started thinking critically and paying more attention to detail keeping a more accurate log of all my observations and alterations while doing experiments.

• I want to really improve on confronting challenges and failures. I know that doing research is all about trial and error but I have always had challenges accepting failures or putting myself into situations where I know I might fail. It is really scary to me to not know how things may turn out or if I am doing this right so a lot of times I step back and don't attempt at all for fear of being seen as incompetent. I want to be able to accept failures and work on  getting the results  that I want to see. How to do that I am not sure but I will start by not being afraid to take on challenges or to attempt experiment and problems. I will work on researching wide and making time to sit down and work on my readings outside of the laboratory settings for my personal growth and learning. I need to be more intentional and take initiative.

• My internship taught me how to utilize previous knowledge from past coursework to conduct experiments and to do data analysis. I have utilized equipment such as the nanodrop machine, centrifuge, and gel electrophoresis apparatus to carry out experiments in my lab which I also use in my current courses. Having gotten to use these equipment I became very familiar with them and now when I use them in class I can use these equipment with ease and teach my classmates how to do the tasks properly.  Apart from using the equipment, my general coursework also became easier to understand as concepts that I was previously taught are now so easy to understand for example I have used the formula for finding the concentration of a substance to find the concentrations that I need to use in my laboratory experiments, I've used it so much that now I can use this equation with ease. I am truly grateful that I have been given this opportunity to utilize my coursework in real-life applications.

• I have also learned new research skills. I have learned how to use a lot of Excel functions and formulas previously unknown to me to perform data analysis. While I still have a lot to learn about Excel I believe I have achieved proficiency in using the software.  I also had to incorporate current coursework in my data analysis as I had to use first and second derivatives to find the local maximum of the data points so that I could find the lipid peaks for my project. I know now that being a researcher doesn't only mean performing experiments, it also means using software to analyze data, and while Excel is just one of the many analysis tools I know that the skills learnt in this experience will be valuable to me in other research experience as I am sure the graphing functions and formulas that I learnt is a good skill to take into a new internship.

• Finally, one of the key things that I have learnt throughout this internship is how to set specific goals. I have been saying that my goal is to pursue a research career and I have talked about the steps I need to take to get there which were specific but not personal enough. I've learned that it is not enough to want to get to the big goals but to build your skill set and experiences to make you ready to achieve your big goals. So for my goals going forward, I want to be able to design and conduct experiments independently this includes developing hypotheses and developing experiments to answer research questions. I want to build on the necessary laboratory skills needed for pursuing a doctorate and I want to feel confident in my skills as a researcher. This is so valuable to me as now I understand that I have been wanting to achieve my goals but never truly found out the necessary goals to building myself to become a researcher.

After assessing my growth throughout this internship, I have noted that there are multiple areas in which I need to improve. This was plain to me even before my internship was through especially during this semester. I do believe that for me to succeed in being a great researcher and doing research I need to not have a lot to do on my plate. So here is a list of things I have added as skills I need to learn and improve on:

• Time management: I struggled a lot in doing my tasks on time as I had a lot of assignments and other extracurriculars to do as well as my research which was very demanding. As such I did not complete tasks in time or took too long for one project especially when it was the spring semester. I intend to improve on this by incorporating a lot of organizational techniques into my daily routine, I will make planners to plan what I am going to do each day and when I am going to do them being very precise by adding time limits to each tasks that I believe will help me to be more meticulous and disciplined.

• Communication: I always felt I was good at communicating with my supervisors and peers overall but then I became timid and no longer felt comfortable doing so as I felt like I was always wrong. I feel like the root of my issues all led back to having too much on my plate and this led to me feeling like I was failing at everything. I lost my confidence and started making mistakes in terms of clear communication but I intend to also be honest and upfront about my feelings and ensure that I perform my duties by informing my supervisors what is going on without being prompted.

• Teamwork: I felt like I let my team down a lot this past semester and as such I intend to in future set clearer expectations for myself and what I am capable of taking on in the team. In this way, I work on my work ethic and become an invaluable member of the team.