What I’ve Learned in Lab

Hello! My name is Celeste and I was fortunate enough to be selected to participate in EUREKA, a program dedicated to guiding students into undergraduate research at UCSB, as well as aiding them in skills development. I am working in the Kosik lab in the MCDB department and I have really enjoyed my time. I’ve only been in my lab for 3 weeks, but these are a few things I have learned (so far) of what it takes to work in a research lab.

  1. PATIENCE

It takes a TREMENDOUS amount of time and patience to do this kind of work. My project consists of more or less two phases, and the first phase is only just now starting to come to an end. There have been times where reagents are not readily available, a step must be repeated because the results were different from the expected, or a certain procedure might just take an entire day or multiple days. This requires that you not get easily frustrated when things don’t go as planned.

  1. COMING IN ON WEEKENDS

Science is not a 9-5 job, the gears are always turning. I’ve found myself coming in on weekends, even if it is just to do one or two things in the mornings, but the fact that the experiments require constant attention something that aspiring scientists must keep in mind. Even if it means having to cancel on your friends/boyfriend. (Sorry guys!)

  1. PERSISTENCE

I think I have been overwhelmed at times, not necessarily because I’ve needed to do a lot of things, but because it was hard for me to understand exactly why I was doing a certain procedure. This also went along with making sure I was doing the procedures correctly and understanding them when I needed to look back at what I had done. These things are hard to juggle, so it’s important to mentally prepare yourself by taking notes of the processes and reasons why you preformed them, and then constantly look back at them until you truly understand what you’re doing.

  1. CONFIDENCE

The first week in lab, I’m not going to lie, I felt pretty minuscule. There are mainly postdocs and only a few graduate students in the lab group, and I am 1 of only 4 undergraduate students. It was very intimidating at first, going to the ab group meetings and staring at the presenter with awe and confusion, trying to decipher what they were explaining. It honestly still is intimidating, but when you realize they are just people too, they make mistakes, and that at some point, they were in the same position you are in now, it’s easier to feel like you belong.

  1. MISTAKES

Speaking of mistakes, I have made a few and learned that yeah, it doesn’t feel great when you know something went wrong because of you. (Like when cells I split got contaminated… whoops.) But it’s important not to let it get to you and keep trudging forward because nothing great ever came from only perfect runs.

  1. PRACTICE

Lastly, it takes practice to become good at anything. Even those with what you could call “natural talent” practice. I attribute almost all of the things I have accomplished to hard work, and it’s not anything different in the lab.

EUREKA  Posted by 10 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

A Breath of Fresh Air: My Personal Experience and Development as an Intern

I accepted my internship at UCSB expecting not to have much free time. I had never had a full-time job or anything resembling such work hours and so I fully expected to be extremely busy. Work typical hours from 9am to 5pm, come back and cook dinner and the day would pretty much be gone. I was then pleasantly surprised to find I had a great deal of time outside of work to hang out with new friends I’ve met, travel and explore the beautiful city of Santa Barbara, and even relax and work on my hobbies in exercising and reading.

During my undergraduate career I was never the most diligent worker and I constantly had problems with time management and procrastination. I’d find myself going to my classes during the day, then spending the afternoon and evening just dilly-dallying and hoping I would eventually start my homework. The internet is such a great way to waste time and it just pulled endless hours out of me as I opened and closed the same social media sites again and again. I definitely noticed this happening and identified it as a huge problem in my life, and so I vowed to spend significantly less time on the computer as soon as I came to my Santa Barbara. New city, new mentality. And so far I’d say it’s been a huge success!

One of the best things I did for myself the first day of my internship was introduce myself to as many people as possible. I’m currently roommates with another intern from a different program, and that first day I had a decision to attend the welcome meeting that was specifically for my roommate’s program, or to stay in and rest after a long day. Choosing to be more open and meet the rest of his program completely opened me up to a whole new circle of students just like myself. All the other interns have been so amazingly intelligent, social and eager to learn. We’re all in very similar programs and it’s been such a pleasure to connect and grow with the rest of them.

In addition, after my typical 8 hour workdays at UCSB I’ve found cutting back on computer usage completely unclogged my schedule. I’ve been able to go to the gym after work as it’s so convenient and the gym itself is absolutely massive. In the evenings I find myself hanging out with my peers, whether it’s making a good meal, playing pool, or just talking while sipping a good drink. And on the weekends I’m more active than I thought I’d ever be; I’ve been hiking three times and been to four different beaches in three weeks (Arroyo Burro Beach was the best by far!) as well as tried some delicious restaurants on State Street. It’s truly been a blessing to be able to make meaningful contributions in cutting-edge research in one of the most beautiful cities on the West Coast. This internship so far has really helped me develop into a more social, active and independent individual.

AIM  Posted by 09 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

My (first) Disastrous Night

One of the most important parts of research is making mistakes. This can be terrifying because from the time that we’re young we’re taught that mistakes are a bad thing, so when I messed up almost every part of my first solo reaction, I thought I was done for. I figured that if my mentor didn’t kick me out of lab for the day he would yell at me or be incredibly angry. But none of that happened and I learned a lot. So I’m going to tell my story of my colossal mess up because it’s pretty funny and to show other perfectionists like me that mistakes are okay.

The day started off normal, my mentor was helping me finish working up a reaction that I had set up the previous day and then I started helping him work on his reaction. He asked me to use a machine called a rotovap to evaporate the solvent so that he could see if he made the right thing. I grabbed a flask and started doing what he asked but when he came back in and told me that I grabbed a flask that was wet with water (his reaction was water sensitive). He wasn’t so happy with me after that but he scolded me and got over it. Later, after we finished with everything, he told me that he was going to the office to work on his stuff and he wanted me to work up another reaction that I had done on my own. This was the beginning of a long night.
The first thing I had to do was a simple filtration just so that I could filter away anything I didn’t want (keep in mind this was something I had been doing for months). I grabbed the wrong size funnel and ended up clogging it so what should have been a 2-minute filtration took around an hour. He came in and told me this and essentially said “oh well, start on the next part.” The next part of my work up was washing my solution with salt water and a certain solvent, pretty easy. Well it should have been. I used way too much salt water so it ended up taking me multiple hours and about 6 different Erlenmeyer flasks for one simple wash. But I finally did it and then I had to evaporate the solvent just like I did earlier in the day. I ended up spilling the solvent all over the machine and my mentor had to come in, take it apart, and thoroughly clean it for me.
By the time I was done it was almost 11:30 at night (I started at 6). I jokingly told my mentor that he should find another student and he looked at me, laughed, and said “you’re full of it if you think you’re the only undergrad to ever mess up. This is minor.”
We both left the lab laughing about the day.

EUREKA  Posted by 08 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

Life as an Intern: Industry vs Academia

Why research?

I believe acquiring research experience is an invaluable opportunity for undergraduates to understand exactly why we must study across a broad spectrum of different disciplines just to graduate. Different research and internship opportunities have helped me realized that undergraduate studies are designed to transition students from effective test takers to effective learners.

Like most students, I spend a fair share of my college life taking notes off of lecture slides and reading textbooks from cover-to-cover just to pass a couple exams for my classes every quarter. I can’t call myself the strongest test taker in the world, but I have acclimated to the fast-pace academic lifestyle of a school following a quarter system. Rather than actually learning though, I sometimes felt I was just memorizing instead of understanding course material to pass my midterms and finals.

I sought different internship opportunities because I enjoyed applying what I learned in class to actual hands-on work in instructional labs. I was fortunately given opportunities to intern in both industrial and academic environments to get a sense of what a career in research may be like. In the following sections, I will compare my life as an intern in both academic and industrial environments with various criteria. Hopefully, some of my experiences will resonate with you and even inspire you to pursue your own positions within labs.

Environment

I started interning for a private contract research organization, Volochem, that synthesized organic molecules to life scientists in the Bay Area during my late high school and early college career. Few places can compare to the Bay Area in terms of different things to do and see outside of work. However, the commute to my workplace was the caveat to this experience. I took many Ubers, rode public buses and subways, and crossed the bay every morning and evening just to commute to and from work each day. Travel time to work would usually total over two hours each day and would sometimes leave me exhausted.

In contrast, my commute to my current research lab at UCSB is just a ten-minute bike ride from my current home. Although Isla Vista – which is a one square mile community of UCSB college students – comes nowhere close to the diversity of the Bay Area in terms of different cultures and activities to experience, the vicinity of our campus and a bustling college atmosphere definitely makes up for it. Living on a beach is also one very small perk that we definitely do not brag about to our friends at home.

Actual Work       

I’m currently researching protein folding and its interaction with artificial surfaces in Plaxco’s research group at UCSB through the Gorman Scholars Internship offered by CSEP. Through my internship, I work underneath a post-doc “super mentor” that advises me through a research project that I’m currently working on. Other than following protocols for protein expression and purification, I realized research involves having a flexible and dynamic approach to obtaining data. Since we’re exploring numerous unknowns in a highly specialized field, we sometimes must think on our feet because we can never predict the outcome of experiments we design.

In an industrial lab setting, I always had a checklist of things to do every day. I knew how each work day of the week would start and how many tasks I should accomplish each day. From chemical inventory management to performing simple reactions, everything I did was already done before. Therefore, I knew exactly how to perform all my tasks and in the event that something goes wrong, I could easily troubleshoot and fix my problems.

Learning Curve

My only exposure to anything STEM related at that time of my internship with Volochem was my AP chemistry class. So of course, I was very nervous and even scared to step foot into a synthetic chemistry lab. Thankfully, my boss and the on-site chemists at this lab were very helpful in mentoring me during my internship. There are many highly specialized instruments with highly specific functions needed in this lab that I have never been exposed to. My peers gave me terrific guidance and eased my nerves very quickly when it came to working with them.

My mentor and lab mates in Plaxco’s research group are equally helpful in terms of pointing me in the right direction. Adjusting to a new lab environment was a very pleasant experience. It seems that in laboratory environments, people are willing to answer questions and build upon each other’s ideas. Group discussions are frequent which really helps in understanding complex theories for our experiments.

Impact

I have acquired more career-specific skills through my internships than sitting in a classroom listening to lectures. Hardly anything from lecture halls can compare to the number of practical skills I acquired by working inside a lab, both industrial and academia. However, working in labs helped me understand the importance of college. The diverse classes I have taken here which ranges through a myriad of subjects have enabled me to critically think through many different scopes. My critical analytical skills developed by my current undergraduate studies have transferred well into a dynamic approach to problems that arise in research. I am thankful the opportunities given to me have helped me develop this approach to tackling problems and I hope readers of this post have experienced or will experience something similar to this.

Gorman  Posted by 03 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

The Beginning of a Journey

My first day of lab seemed to be the most surreal moment I experienced. Being a student that has been looking for research over the course of a year I finally felt that I had accomplished my goal. I wanted to be as productive as possible in lab in order to show my PI that I was really motivated for my project. I guess you could call it enthusiasm but I saw it as my first real opportunity to succeed in my career as a chemical engineer.

After having a brief meeting with my PI about my project, I never anticipated that the next thing we would do is walk to the lab together, only to find the most mysterious machine I have ever seen. It looked like fire hydrant but of course I was not about to say that to my PI. It did not click to my brain until I realized that this machine would be my best friend for the rest of my summer. Sometimes in life you do not pick your best friends, and I never thought that my best friend would be a fire hydrant. Nevertheless, I was ready to learn something new.

The so called fire hydrant is actually a chamber where I create plasmas, which is a beam created from cascading electrons. There was an intensive information overload and I have yet to grasp the whole concept of plasmas and plasma deposition but for now I am satisfied with understanding as much as possible from my PI.

The first couple days of lab involved assisting my PI to properly calibrate the device used for plasma deposition. We needed to calibrate things like flowrate, voltage, and current and the measurements that I needed to do for these calibrations were the most rewarding measurements I have ever done. I actually told that to my PI and he expressed surprise to my reaction of the grunt work that I was doing.

The best thing about my PI is that I am never worried about sounding unintellectual. Often times during lab my PI cracks light-hearted jokes that lessens the tension in the atmosphere and it makes me realize that the environment that I am working in is meant to be a nurturing one. I guess the worry of not being smart stems from classes where hard work is represented only through a letter grade. Of course devotion and growth are not reflected in grades and the only person that can understand my hard work is only myself. Classes are not just for grades, but it is nice to do research where I have no grade at all. I has already been two weeks and I feel that I have learned a lot of useful skills than any class could teach me. My PI taught me to drill holes, apply tape to screws, and create airtight containers. As he taught these tasks to me, he always ensured to stress the reasoning behind each thing that we did together. I would say that I am on the right track.

Gorman  Posted by 02 Aug 2017 / 0 comments