Ding! As the sound of the email notification surprised me, the tiny email box showed up at the corner of my laptop screen. When I realized I got accepted into this program, I was looking forward to this being the highlight of my Summer going into Junior year. About 150 people applied to this program and only 30 got accepted, I felt honored and determined to use this amazing opportunity to my advantage. There were 2 sessions, I was in Session 1 and there were a total of 16 people in there. For the first week, we learned about the foundation of cancer and the immune system functions. We did many labs in the first week such as learning how to use a microscope and micropipette, running an electrophoresis gel, looking at blood & HeLa cells under a microscope, and running an ELISA test & PCR of BRCA1 gene. For the second week, we listened to many speakers about their careers and their day to day life as a researcher and how they got started. Throughout the span of two weeks I was so intrigued by all the activities that we did because it was so different from science class in high school and I felt a strong connection to the things I participated in. My main highlight of this program was the SURP (Summer Undergraduate Research Program) poster showcase. The SURP program are for undergraduate students who are about to become rising seniors. At the end of their program, they presented their research that they were working on through designing posters. This information session really opened my eyes about what other people were doing to solve daily medical problems with their innovative strategies. As I walked around and talked to the undergrads: I was so amazed at their accomplishments because when I was talking to one of the undergrads, they mentioned that they had no previous knowledge of their project before the program. That shocked me because they seemed as if they had studied it for years! This helped me gain confidence in myself and that I can become a successful researcher.
On the second day of this program, we made an “About Me” card where we illustrated what was important in our lives. This is posted outside our lab
On this day, we created the insulin peptide and learned about the different structures of amino acids.
We did a lab where we used CRISPR cas9 and guide RNAs to cut our BRCA1 PCR product. Before the lab, we made predictions about the fragment sizes of the gRNAs (guide RNAs) using a website called benchling. Here, we compared our results after our experiment by doing a poster.
