There are three other students from High Tech High Media Arts interning in the lab as well and we decided to all present together upon request from our mentor. The format for our presentation has two main components. First we all take turns discussing the different things we did/ learned while at internship. Then at the end we each talk about our own personal growths and meet all of our IPOL requirement questions and discussions given to us by our teachers. We decided to present with a powerpoint presentation.
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POL Section 2—Your ideas about life outside of high school
1. What new appreciations did you develop while working as an intern? Why? I learned to appreciate my coworkers/ peers because they are the ones that help me the most. Now thinking about it, being at my internship by myself would have been more stressful and confusing. There were times that I didn't understand the way some things worked or I just needed to bounce ideas off of someone and my other fellow interns were my biggest help during this process. It was also helpful because in a way we challenged each others intelligence and learned from each other. 2. What qualities or characteristics did you see in the people around you that you want to develop in yourself? Why? In research there is a lot of failure and troubleshooting which takes persistence . A researcher named Moritz was conducting a western blot and it didn't work when he was trying to image the proteins. Although Moritz was disappointed he didn't let this roadblock affect him negatively. He talked to Jan and eventually found out the problem was the antibodies he was using. Instead of getting upset and creating a mental block for himself he discussed what went wrong and changed the procedure a bit then he tried again and it worked. Persistence is a skill I could use whenever I am challenged. 3. How did your view of life beyond high school change or develop during your time as an intern? I realized once you leave high school life gets real. Especially being on a college campus and speaking with students, college keeps you busy and its a lot of hard work. But I've also realized that I won't hate my life in college. High schoolers have this distorted view on college, we're not going to have a social life or have time to do other things. This is not true, yes you will be busy in college but if the students I've met like Sim and Matt have time to volunteer in the lab and socialize and are relatively happy people I'm sure we'll be just fine. Yes college is scary and hard work, but its also one of the best times of our lives and shape us into the adults were going to be for the rest of our lives. 4. How might internship influence the direction of your life? Internship has influenced the direction of my life tremendously I think its made me decide my career choice. I knew I really liked chemistry and biology, but now that I've worked in a research lab I've beyond confirmed my belief that science is awesome. Since now I know for sure I like the material (biomedical) side of biomedical engineering I think this can really be a career I go for. I also for sure know I'm going to college. 5. How did communication and/or collaboration at work influence your understanding of professional working environments? In the lab researchers are constantly bouncing ideas off of each other or helping each other with supplies (media, antibodies, pipettes, rabbit brain, they share everything.) To me it felt a lot like school, lots of group projects, critiques and sharing ideas. This has shown me that collaboration in very important in a business like this, which makes me very glad I go to HTHI because group projects have taught me how to collaborate and communicate effectively. 1. How did you make a meaningful contribution to your workplace? We assisted them in various ways. Whatever they needed from us such as getting ice, writing on conical tubes, counting worms and more. We also took part in collecting data for the memory assays with our very own set of worms. 2. How was your work as an intern meaningful to your education? I have learned so much here, it was the 3rd day of internship and I was surprised by how much I had already learned. It's amazing because it's a different kind of learning thats so much more helpful. In a classroom were getting told how things work and just expected to remember. In the lab were watching things happen and understanding why its happening at the same time. I've had so many people tell me how lucky I am to have an experience like this because there really is no better way to learn science than to actually be in an environment that deals directly with science. 3. How was your work significant or meaningful for you beyond school and your specific internship site? The work I've done here at internship has been specifically meaningful to me because this is a passion of mine. I love science, I love questioning why things work and this was the perfect environment for that. These past 3 weeks have been amazing, there has not been a minute that I was bored. I really don't want to go back to school because of all the awesome stuff I'm learning here. 4. How did your project(s) go from an idea or inspiration to a final product? Share out the process & be sure to upload evidence(s) of this work. Coming into internship Dr. Patel already had an idea of what our main project was going to be which was the memory assays with the C. elegans. The reason for this is because worms are easy to work with and propose no risk. Other than this we just did mini tasks like making agar plates, labeling conicals, getting ice, we also got to run a fake western blot so we could practice pipetting the "cells with the protein" into the gel. Mostly we observed the other tasks being performed by other researchers such as a western blot, cell culturing, Langendorff heart, organ harvesting, helium chambers with mice, heart lecture and electron microscope. Which was awesome and fascinating! 5. What did you learn about yourself through working on the internship project(s)? I learned that I really enjoy biomedical research and I would like to enter a field in the biomedical industry. After taking chemistry and biology in school I was thinking about going into biomedical engineering, but I didn't want to go through the long and expensive schooling for it and now I think it's worth it. I really enjoy biology and medicine and creating new ideas, so I think this could be for me. The projects we did and observed also just confirmed my love for biology. Throughout my internship the experiences have obviously been different than the kind of experiences I would have in school. Although we can't bring a lab to the school there are some very valuable skills that my internship has taught me aside from all the fascinating science that I could bring with me when I return to school. Working with experiments has taught me most about being resilient after failure. There are so many times when mistakes are made or a procedure/experiment doesn't go right, I've learned that this is okay. Dr. Patel said something during lunch to us one day and it really stuck to me. He said, "there are two kinds of people, the ones who failure/mistakes destroy them, all they do is get upset with themselves and become non-productive. Or theres people that accept that they've failed, brush it off, figure it out why it went wrong and then try again." This can be applied to my academic career because I'm always going to make mistakes and I will not be able do everything perfectly. But I've learned to instead use my failures as a lesson than a setback.
Today we were assigned to read 3 of our peers internship blogs. I read Taylor', Ashley' and Ben's blog.
I learned a lot about what they are doing at their internships and the experiences they're having there. The diversity of internships is super cool and we can all learn about different experiences from each other. Ashley is in Ecuador interning at a daycare, Taylor's in a classroom at HTE with 4th graders and Ben's at a gaming facility. There's no doubt that we will all have different takeaways from our internships and we will all grow in different aspects. When we go back to school it will be really interesting to see everyone flow back into the groove of being in school and watching how these growths and new found strengths can help us academically. This has been my first full week of internship and it is so different than the school week. The main difference is, of course, that I'm in a lab rather than a classroom, but in my opinion the lab is the best learning environment. Because we're watching these procedures being done and learning the science behind it at the same time, it makes so much more sense. At school I can be a little more independent because I can work on my own projects and micromanage myself where as at the lab I can't do a lot by myself because of the expensive material we work with and the importance of the experiment; Which is completely understandable and we still get to do a lot of hands on work. Today we started bleaching our worms so we can run our very own memory assays. This is really exciting because Meghna let us do it all on our own! Through this process I learned that experiments/science is a lot of making mistakes, troubleshooting then trying again. Dr. Patel told us the other day at lunch, "science takes a lot of patience and thick skin." This statement couldn't be any more true and the acceptance of failure is a skill I can definitely use through life. Internship has taught me that the journey to become a biomedical researcher/engineer will take a lot of work in school, but all of the awesome stuff you get to work with once you finish makes it so worth it.
For more in depth description of my project read the blog post below! The project I will be working on the most is the memory assay with worms called C. elegans. The whole point is to find out whether the worms with more caveolin protein can remember better than the worms with normal amounts of caveolin or less.
We have 3 different strains of worms. One with the normal amounts of the caveolin protein (N2) we call this the wild type. One with less caveolin (CAV2-) we call these knock out worms and one with more caveolin (CAV2+) we call these over expressed worms. With each of these strains we run an expirement that will test their memory.
So far we have started our own worm plates and are waiting for them to become crowded. Once they are crowded we can bleach them so only the eggs are left (this is to make sure all of our worms are around the same age when we run our experiment on them). Meghna told us we should be able to start bleaching tomorrow or Friday. Most of my day is spent on the 5th floor of the Biomedical Sciences Building in Dr. Patel's lab. There is an office for Dr. Patel (my mentor) and an office for "Dr. Patel fellows" which are all of the researchers under Dr. Patel's wing. And then there's Dr. Patel's lab which is the lab we work in. There are also many other offices for other PI's (principal investigators) and their own labs. The people who work under Dr. Patel's wing in his lab are the people that I am with everyday. Some of them work here and some of them are doing independent research. Our, I like to call her our 2nd mentor, is Meghna who we are with most of the time. We address to her in the mornings and if we have any questions we would go to her. She is our primary teacher, but we also learn a lot from the other researchers. Mehul works with cells, Moritz works with exposing organisms to helium and seeing if there is a benefit to this and Meghna works with the C. elegans doing memory assays. When we're not working in the lab we are in our intern office which is right down the hall working on research papers or discussing clarifying questions.
My hours are usually 9 am to about 4-4:30 pm. I can't believe it's only been three days because I feel like I've done and learned so much already! We've started our own worm colonies, finished the process of a western blot, started culturing and preparing cells for an experiment and bleached a set of worms in preparation for the memory assay experiment next week. We've also read two different scientific writing pieces and are going to discuss them next week. Next week will be an exciting week! We are hoping that our worm colonies will be overcrowded so we can really start the memory assay experiment with our own worms.
This has been my first Friday in the lab and there really is no difference, everyone just leaves earlier. I can't wait to see how much more I'm going to learn these next three weeks. Hopefully I'll get some pictures posted soon! I've been at my internship for 2 days and I already love it! We've had so much hands on experience already and within the 2 days I feel I have learned so much already. Everyone who works in the lab are so nice, open to letting us watch them work and explain what they're doing to us. We've also been able to do so much hands on work ourselves. It's an amazing environment for learning.
Over the course of this internship we will have one main project but be working with many different scientific methods and procedures. Our main project is a memory assay with worms called C. Elegans. We each got to create our own "worm colony" and will get to do our own experiment with our own worms. We then will learn to assess our data and create graphs and tables with it. Along with this thought we have learned about the procedure "Western Blot" which is used to identify specific proteins in a sample of tissue. We will also get to learn about culturing cells and how to take care of them. I've learned in these two days that I definitely need to work on my vocabulary and be more patient with dense scientific readings. Very complicated vocabulary is used in the lab and in readings we are given. I've learned it's best to take what you understand first and give yourself a broad idea of what the paper is stating and then go into specifics. This makes dense readings a lot less intimidating, but it does require patience and persistence. I love the work I'm doing. I find it so interesting and I have not been bored a minute while I'm in the lab or even reading scientific writings and discussing them with my peers. So far my favorite thing has been watching a researcher work with cells (his research involves studying how caveolin affects the healing process of broken membranes. So he injects a virus that contains caveolin into the cell and then inserts the other protein into the cell through RNA and sees if this heals broken membranes faster than each protein in the cell would by itself.) I also really enjoyed learning how to do the Western Blot procedure (a researcher has a hypothesis that inhaling helium will raise the amount of a certain protein 'caveolin' in your cells, so he put rats in chambers with helium and took some of their tissue and did the western blot procedure to see if there was more caveolin present in their tissue.) I can't wait to start my memory assay with the C. Elegans and I'm hoping we'll get to go into the VA Medical Center to look in on some cool research projects! |
Lizzy Marquez
I am an 11th grade student at High Tech High International. I have recently, through my classes, discovered a passion for biology, chemistry, and medicine which has led me to consider pursuing a career in Biomedical Engineering. I love the idea of using my enthusiasm for science to improve the lives of others. When I read about the type of research Dr. Patel does at UCSD I knew I wanted to be a part of it. I am very excited to have this opportunity to practice the principles of researching and applying science to learn about illnesses. |