Prompt: What does it mean to do research? Reflect on what research looks like to you.
I have been surrounded by research my whole life. In my family, I have six close family members who are a part of academia who do research. Both my parents, two of my great uncles, and my great grandfather have done research in math and taught at different universities and my grandfather did research in physics and taught at University of Michigan. Growing up, the idea of research to me was confusing because it seemed as though it could be a wide variety of projects. Sometimes I would hear about coral research and other times there would be research which I did not understand a word of. When asking what research was, I was always told that it was creating or discovering something that has never been seen before. I still see this as true, however I also see how much more goes into research than I had thought when I was younger.
I have seen research take many different forms. In the past I have been a part of a bioengineering lab at George Mason University which was a wet lab. In this lab, research was done on different types of cells in petri dishes. Every semester there was a mouse surgery in which we extracted cells from the embryos of a pregnant mouse. We then did research on these cells for the rest of the semester. The day to day work of this lab was taking care of the cells and monitoring them. The days in which we would perform an experiment on the cells and get results was only a small part of it.
In addition to wet lab work, I have also been a part of two separate labs which did computational work. The first of those was at the University of Michigan in which I used python to visualize simplified neural networks. The second computational lab I joined, which I am still a part of, is at the University of Virginia, where I am a student. This lab is in the Environmental Science department. The project I work on there is on the synchrony of kelp where I use statistical methods to analyze data sets in order to determine how synchronous kelp growth is and why it is synchronous. In the computational labs, almost all of the time is spent coding. This is very different from the work I did in the wet lab, and the problems I ran into were different. In the wet lab, our cells once got contaminated and we were not able to do our project at all until we had new cells. In the computational lab, I have made mistakes in my coding which results in bugs which have skewed my data. Solving issues in my computational work has been much easier than in the wet lab work, and for that reason I enjoy computational research more.
Research looks like many different things to me. It looks like feeding cells weekly, coding in python, and analyzing data sets. To me research is anything that results in a new conclusion that has not been seen before. I appreciate that there is such a wide variety to what forms research can take.