About Me

A good team member is someone who works well with their teammates and does their share of the workload. I am an easy-going person and a hard worker. I make sure to do my part of a team effort project, if not more, and want to make it as an enjoyable process as possible. I always can improve my people skills and how to handle different types of situations.

I have observed many examples of professional conduct at my internship site. However, I think the best examples come from my site leader Dr. Alam and the Principal Investigator Dr. Econs. They are two individuals who are always very punctual and have so much passion for their work. I hope to have as much my passion for my career after I've been doing it for years. Furthermore, they command a level of respect for the work they done and I've seen people hold them in a certain sense of awe for the discoveries they've made. I want to one day make a discovery that changes some aspect of medicine and know that I've accomplished something that can be used to change a person's life.

I have learned so much and grown in many areas since starting at my LHSI internship in September. It has been a rewarding experience and its impacts will have effects on my life for years to come. My interest and love for my major and pre-professional focus have only been strengthened over this past academic year. My sense of professionalism has grown immensely as well and I now better understand how to act in a professional work setting. I still need to learn how to better work independently. However, the COVID-19 situation has improved that skill as well since I've had to work from home and help is not nearly as accessible as it was when I was in the lab. I believe that I was a good team member, but the others in my lab were the best team-workers. They always were able to readily help me with whatever I needed and even helped me finish experiments when time was growing short.

I was always strong in work-ethic and accountability. I always would work as hard as I could at whatever I was doing and was never late to work or forgot about a commitment. I still need to grow in the areas of working independently and time management. I felt that I always needed a lot of help in the experiments I was performing. Also, I never was able to stick to a good schedule during my shifts because the experiments always took much longer than I expected them to. Improving upon these skills would allow me to be a much more valuable member of any laboratory team.

My team role changed drastically throughout the year. At the beginning, I helped around wherever I could and learned skills in cell culture as well as mice handling. By the end of the year, I had transitioned to my own independent experiment and mainly did things on my own or with help from others. I never had time to help with the other projects going on in the lab and I never handled the mice during the spring semester.