Success
In everything that you do in life, there will be challenges. It is how you work through these challenges that determine your success. In my internship so far, I have had many challenges but have also experienced success.
One of the biggest successes I experienced throughout this internship experience was getting to go to the National Conference for Undergraduate Research, where I presented my research. It was a great experience where I was able to develop my research presentation skills as well as learn a lot about professional schools. One of my main goals for this research internship was to attend research conferences and present my research and I am so happy that I was given the chance to do so. I give a more detailed account of this experience in my "experiences" section of this Eportfolio. Experiences
I have never used Excel to do more than make a graph and maybe find the R-squared value of data points for school assignments. My internship this year saw me using Excel a lot to analyze data for my project. I am working on finding lipid phases induced by specific lipids and to do so I use specific formulas to organize and analyze over 1000 data points. It's quite a lot especially when I started to also have to do the first and second derivative of these data points to find the local max of these points, this incorporates some knowledge from Calculus and I do not like math. I am proud to say however that even though it was hard at first I successfully learnt how to use these formulas and certain Excel functions to analyze the data for my project for me this is one of my biggest successes so far and I am very proud. I believe that I'll be able to use the knowledge learnt in future internships.
Challenges
As I mentioned above, challenges will always present, especially in an internship where you are attempting to achieve ground-breaking results to help further future research.
The most challenging experience in my internship has been constantly feeling as though I lack knowledge about everything I am doing. This internship covers a lot of advanced work. There is a small amount of undergraduate-level coursework involved but a lot of times the material covered or incorporated is a lot more advanced and I feel intimidated by how much I do not know. Like I know beginner biology and Chemistry so it's really hard for me to conceptualize some of the complex biological pathways and especially the formulas for example to find the lipid phases in my project I have to use Bragg's law and that is so complex I have never seen that formula in my life. It is also not enough to use the law to find the phases you have to analyze them and I have no idea what I am looking at most of the time. To overcome this challenge, I intend to ask more questions on topics I do not understand and do more research on common topics so I can learn the literature and background of what I am doing. I intend to try harder to overcome this barrier as I truly wish to understand what I am doing.
Another challenge I am currently facing is flexibility. This semester is more difficult than the last semester, the course load is a lot more as I am doing 16 credit hours and I struggle to complete my coursework as well as my assigned lab work within the time range that I am given and I have to constantly seek extensions on my assigned materials. I constantly feel as if I have too much on my plate and that I am not doing well enough on anything To overcome this challenge I have been trying to work on finding how to prioritize and rearrange my schedule in a way that offers me the best results in all areas of my life.