Internship

Goal of the research is to develop new clinical diagnostics for ACL injury prevention and improve primary ACL reconstruction outcomes in the young patient population to mitigate early-onset osteoarthritis by studying how fatigue-induced damage in the ACL complexes accumulates and how the ACL-complex and surrounding bony structures respond to load perturbations during adolescence and early musculoskeletal maturity in in vivo rodent models. 

Currently as a team member, I believe one of my main strengths is having prior knowledge on human anatomy and physiology because it's allowing me to understand the reasoning behind the experimental design for the study and how each element contributes to the overall goal. Thus, allowing me to dive in into the study without any major obstacles. Moreover, the knowledge is helping me improve my measurements of the tibial angles and the femoral notch. Another strength would be my prior experience with teamwork because everyone in the lab works together on certain tasks to maintain efficiency and help everyone learn new skills and immerse themselves in new experiences. My prior experiences have allowed me to properly express my opinions and ideas in a way that doesn't sound demanding or overpowering. My collaboration skills have enabled me to help solve problems when an experiment didn't go as planned and network with all of the individuals within the lab. 

Throughout the internship, I have been able to establish trust and responsibility by following protocols carefully and clearly communicating where a mistake was made so I could learn how to prevent it in the future. Overall, this promoted my independence in completing assigned tasks and experiments within the study, which opened doors to new learning opportunities within the lab. For example, I learned how to prepare different stains and stain the tissue sections with minimal error because there weren't duplicates of each slide present. As my time advances at this internship, I would like to learn how to section paraffin blocks to prepare the tissue sections for staining along with mastering how to use various imaging software and equipment.

My efforts towards the different tasks I was assigned helped the study progress efficiently in a timely manner. This is because each element is connected with another. For example, I was staining the deparaffinized tissue sections with Safranin O and Picrosirius Red stains, and we couldn't image and analyze the slides until all of them were complete. Now with everyone's combined efforts we are near completion with the study.

Everyone in our team is from a different background and different level of expertise in a variety of subfields. This has been very beneficial when an experiment didn't go as planned because everyone viewed the problem with a different perspective and offered a different solution. When the solutions were combined and tested individually, the causing factor of the problem was identified and improved. For example, when one of our fluorescence stains weren't adhering to the tissue properly, everyone began sharing options for different heat sources we could utilize to keep a constant temperature, such as a heat gun and hot water bath.