The moment before I entered the door to our room on the first day of the program, my heart started beating faster and my palms started sweating. What will we be learning here? What if people don’t accept me? These thoughts shot through my head as I clutched the door handle. What am I doing here? With a deep breath, I opened the door. Despite my fears, I found everyone here to be very friendly and willing to share their vast knowledge with me. The instructors taught with various methods to make sure everyone has a chance to understand.
Although we spent a lot of time in the lab exploring fun experiments, it was the time outside the lab that I will definitely remember. We explored and discussed subjects many other teachers would normally skip over. We learned about bioethics, the Imposter syndrome, and different career pathways. On bioethics, we learned what it was, why it was important, and the examples that had happened in the past. We also had an open practice discussion about HeLa cells and applied what we learned to make our decisions. The Imposter syndrome is the idea that your success was due to luck and not your talents, and someone is going to expose you. We learned that this is not the case, and how we can address this problem. During our 2 week program, we had many opportunities to talk to the various scientists at the Fred Hutch. I thought this was a great experience because we got to learn about the intriguing things they run in their lab which helped me imagine myself in their shoes. Two weeks was all it took for me to have a clearer look into the future.
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