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In this upcoming school year, I will be working with Dr. Richard L Gregory to research oral pathology. Together we will design an experiment for me to work on for the year. Dr Gregory works in the dental school as a professor and assicuate dean and in the oral health building as a researcher where I will be working with him.
Learning and Skills
Learning and Skills
This experience will allow me to expand on my skills as a researcher and hopefully get more comfortable in the enviornment. I hope to become more confident in my independent working skills and see my experiment through start to finish.
What I am excited about this semester is to contribute to a project that has not been researched widely before. While researching for this project on PubMed there were zero results for this experiment that I am doing with these parameters. Since I am carrying out this experiment by myself with the instruction of my supervisor, this experiment feels very personal to me as it has never been done before and I am seeing it through from start to finish.
Completing my first semester of the LHSI Internship, I have learned to be more adaptable in situations. Sometimes experiments do not work out the way we exect and that is just apart of research. At first it was a bit frustrating to not achieve the desired results but learning to make adjustments and repeat the process is a big opportunity for growth as this can be applied to any aspect of life. I have also learned better time management skills. While working in a laboratory, it is imperitive to be able to multi task. While a trial is being ran over the course of a specific time, another portion of your experiment may need to be ran in that down time. These two experiments may overlap so keeping track of each one may be difficult but as time goes on learning to adapt to this time managment becomes much easier.
Looking back on this past semester, my favorite part of my internship so far has been successfully completing my first independent experiement. For the first few trials, I had my supervisor walk me through to ensure that I was doing it correctly. By the third week, I felt ready and able to run my experiement on my own. On the final day that a trial was ran, I had Dr. Gregory, my supervisor, check over my data to see if everything was reading as expeted and he told me that I had done everything correctly! I was so proud of myself for being able to do something like this completely unsupervised and actually be able to pull it off. Now I can converse about my research in detail and actually describe what is going on within the experiment. This has all been an amazing period of growth for me!
The workplace
The workplace
After spending a month in the workplace, some professional skills that I wish to possess are articulation in my speech and being able to share my results with others in order to help them with their experiments.
The area that I want to grow as a professional is my time management. I find that I get caught up in other things that I sometimes struggle to meet deadlines or things slip my mind and I completely neglect to do them.
My internship experience has been extremely different from when I started in the fact that I did not think that I would be able to understand everything and do independent work. In my previous lab experiences, I was always the one who tended to watch the experiment happen and let someone else take the lead whereas now, I am leading my own research. I also did not expect to be so passionate about the project that I am doing. Since I developed it from the start, I feel a sense of ownership over it and am invested in seeing it through to completion.
This semester, I plan to work on keeping track of my data and working towards putting it together as a presentation. Next semester I have both the LHSI poster presentation and a presentation within the dental school so it would be beneficial to me to compile my data into excel now and update it periodically instead of all at once.
This semester, I have been working on multiple experiments to prove my hypothesis that red raspberry juice will inhibit the growth of bacteria in the oral cavity. Just last week I added nicotine in the experiment to simulate the oral cavity of a smoker. Ellagic Acid is present in red raspberries so I created an experiment with different dilutions of nicotine and a specific concentration of Ellagic Acid to see at which concentration the ellagic acid will inhibit the growth of bacteria in the oral cavity.
The skills on the list that I am using are communication skills and independent work skills. I have been getting more confident with working independently. I have run many trials of my experiment so the more I do that, the more comfortable I am with carrying it out and analyzing my results.
The skill that I would like to continue to work on is communication of my data and explaining what the numbers mean. When I run my experiment through the spectrophotometer it gives me levels of absorbance per well and I am still working on understanding what good figures look like and what bad figures look like. I also would like to better understand the deviation from my data as compared to the expected data.
With what I am doing in my internship, it has directly helped me with all of my labs that I am in right now. I was always a bit unsure how to accurately use a pipette and other lab machinery and now that I have practice using them almost every single day in my internship site, it has helped me excel in classes. Additionally, specific content that I have learned in my lectures have been applicable to things that I have learned in my LHSI site. Talking about cell colony growth or how to promote/ inhibit growth are things that I am exposed to on a daily basis at my site and that is a major part of many biology courses that I am currently taking or have taken previously. Working hands on in my LHSI site has helped me gain a deeper understanding of my coursework because sometimes it is difficult for me to understand a concept in lecture but actually doing it and seeing how things physically work instead of conceptually has aided me in a more successful way when completing my coursework.
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