My Internship

I work in the Radiation Oncology lab under researcher Dr. Marc Mendonca. I help to conduct cancer research by observing the effects of radiation and different treatments on cancer cells. Every week I conduct experiments where we grow different cancer cell lines, use different types of drugs to drug them, radiate the cells, and then plate them for survival. It allows us to understand how effective using drugs and radiation is as a treatment for cancer, and also how radiation can potentially cause cancer. In 2018 alone, approximately 1,735,350 new cases of cancer developed and about 609,000 people died from it. Any type of research on cancer can be helpful for finding better effective treatments, and maybe one day a cure. I chose this internship site because I've always been interested in cancer and may want to work with it in the future. I really enjoy that I get to do my own experiments and work individually. I'm expecting to be most successful at continuously learning new things and being able to apply them later in life. I think the most challenging part of the internship is using the radiation machine because it's very huge and expensive, and has to be handled extremely carefully.

The Life Health Sciences Internship will give me the opportunity to explore my career interests and gain hands on experience working with cancer cells. It will also allow me to gain leadership skills and to develop myself professionally for experiences I may have in the real world. I will be able to successfully create relationships that will help me on my career path and be more prepared for medical school. I will also be able to continue to develop my communication skills.

Because I work with cancer cells in lab I learn a lot about their cell biology, how cancer can be hereditary, environmentally caused, or a mixture of both, and how they react to specific treatments. I have touched on or learned about all of these things in general bio courses I have taken, and a lot about hereditary and treatments in genetics. Because my lab corresponds to some of the things I am learning, I am able to gain a better understanding of the content because I actually get to work with cancer cells to see how they behave and act. It really gives me a great hands on approach to learning.