Take a Hike: My Summer Research Experience

With summer in full swing, I now have more time to pursue two of my interests: hiking and research. Before I went into the lab last Saturday, my roommate and I decided to go on a short hike to 7 Falls. We kept climbing up, and before we knew it, we had gone far past what should’ve been the halfway point. We kept debating if we should turn around or “just keep hiking for another ten minutes”; after many “ten more minutes” and no end in sight, we finally decided to head back. Later that night, when I returned from lab, I googled the trails in the area. We had turned right at the wrong fork, and had we kept going, our three mile hike would’ve turned into an eleven mile one that we certainly weren’t prepared for!

In my first three weeks as a EUREKA! Intern, I’ve realized hiking and research have more in common than meets the eye. In my lab, I’m learning to create DNA nanotubes, and throughout the process, I have to ask myself “Should I turn around?”. If I make a mistake, will it ruin my progress and be a waste of time to keep going? Or, was my mistake minor enough that it won’t affect my results, and it would be a waste of resources to start over? Once, for example, we were running gel electrophoresis (a process which uses electric current to separate DNA by size through the pores of a gel) but our wells overflowed since we poured the gel too high; we decided it would be best to keep going since most of the wells contained the same type of sample. Another time, however, we realized we used the wrong type of buffer when making our nanotubes, and had to restart.

When I first started in my lab, I was as unfamiliar with the procedures as I am with the local trails in Santa Barbara. My mentor had to guide me through each step and it took us three days to complete the process of making our nanotubes. Now, as I gain more confidence and a better understanding of how the nanotubes are made, I am able to complete the process in a single day. I’m able to better judge where I made a wrong turn and how far back down the “trail” I need to go in order to get back on course. When I was imagining a sample under the microscope this Friday, I initially couldn’t see anything. I decided to remake my slide but dilute my sample less, and this time around, I was able to see the nanotubes. While this particular backtrack solved my imaging problem, the nanotubes themselves appeared extremely short, and the measurements of the concentration of DNA in this sample were much lower than normal; unfortunately, it looks like it’s time to go back to the start of the trail.

As the summer progresses, I’m looking forward to continuing to develop my understanding of how scientific research works (and also getting in a few more hikes). The more time I spend in the lab, the more I’m able to judge whether I’m on the right path or not. Hopefully I’ll soon learn to do the same with our local trails.

EUREKA  Posted by 24 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

The Useful Powers of Office Hours

College can be a confusing time, especially when there’s no clear path towards success. When I was given the freedom to pick my own major, classes, and extracurricular activities, I felt overwhelmed. I entered UCSB as an Environmental Studies major, but I actually had no specific direction for my academic or professional future in mind. In fact, I had applied to other schools as different majors, because I really had no idea where I wanted my life to go during or after college.

I started college worried that I would be unable to do well in school without a larger plan to motivate me, so I decided to go to office hours to hopefully get advice from someone who might have been in my position before. I went to my TA for my Introduction to Environmental Studies class because it was the only class I had that was in my major department, so it would be likely that someone teaching the class would have advice most relevant to me.

I thought that things would be awkward and I wouldn’t learn anything, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my TA, Zoe Welch (pictured with me above this post’s title), was incredibly understanding and insightful. She helped me understand that I can’t really ask someone else what the “right” thing to do is, because that’s something that only I can answer in time.

Looking back, meeting and talking with Zoe was one of the most pivotal things that happened to me in my first year here. The majority of my successes in undergraduate research so far can be traced back to my interactions with her, as she helped me navigate college life, research, and even the majors that UCSB offers.

Zoe also told me about her experiences in graduate school and research, which made me feel much more comfortable about trying to get involved in undergraduate research. This confidence brought me to applying for an internship with the Burkepile Lab at the end of my first quarter, and I’ve worked as an undergraduate research assistant for them for the last six months. That position led me to apply for the EUREKA scholarship and my current work in the McCauley Lab, as I only learned about the scholarship’s existence from a graduate student in the Burkepile Lab. Zoe even wrote the recommendation letter that got me the scholarship, and we keep in touch regularly.

Some of the people working in the Burkepile Lab during Winter Quarter 2017.

Over the last year, I’ve had the luck to to speak with an assortment of graduate students and professors through office hours, lab work, and even mentorship programs. Multiple graduate students here have told me that they started their PhD programs with the intention of pursuing research, then changed gears to focus more on teaching after getting a taste of the ins and outs of academia. I’ve met people who obtained their master’s degrees, then decided they didn’t really love what they were studying and chose a very different for their PhD topic. All of this came to me as a surprise, as I had been under the impression that a person had to be completely assured and confident to succeed in research and academia. It’s really never too late to change when it comes to school, and it’s absolutely normal to be unsure.

The first step is to talk to people you want to learn from; if you’re interested in a certain subject within your field, look up professors and graduate students who study it and send them an email. Professors and teaching assistants are people who exist outside of lecture halls and discussion sections, and many of them are more than happy to help students sharpen their interests and share what they know. Not everyone will be able to assist you, but there are plenty of people at this university who are happy to help, as long as you ask and are willing to listen to what they have to say. You never know what you might find or learn from getting out there and asking questions, so take advantage of being here at this university and talk to people!

Ultimately, you don’t need to have every aspect of your professional future planned out to be successful, even when working in research. It is all but impossible to know exactly where your life will be in a few years, and your interests are likely to change and evolve as you become more aware of possibilities you never could have imagined.

Even after my experiences finishing my first year of college and working in the Burkepile and McCauley Labs, I still lack certainty on what I want to do after college or study for the next three years. But for now, I’m enjoying working in research and being part of a team where we get to use our heads to collaborate and do something that feels like it matters.

EUREKA  Posted by 23 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

My First Lab Meeting

When I walked into my first lab meeting there seemed to be almost an unspoken hierarchy amongst the researchers in the lab. The PhD’s sat at the conference table in the center of the room, the graduate students sat in chairs along the sides of the room, and the undergraduates sat in the back. There was no seating chart; this was just the natural order of things. The lab meeting consisted of one presentation given by one researcher about the research he and his fellow PhD’s had been working on. It contained so much complex, dense material that I couldn’t even understand the entirety of the title with its acronyms and fancy scientific language. To me, this presentation was a blur of advanced terminology, intricate methods, and scientific acronyms. There were some parts I understood the general concepts of, but for the most part the research being presented was very confusing to me. I sat in my chair in the back of the room with the section of my notebook I labeled “Lab Meeting Notes” sitting on my lap completely empty, feeling ignorant, and a little discouraged. I was use to sitting in my classes and knowing what was going on while being able to give active participation. The only aspect of this research meeting I was able to participate in was the devouring of the macaroons that were provided as refreshments. Meanwhile, at the conference table the PhDs and the PI were asking questions, giving input, and collaborating with each other as well as the presenter.

As I looked around the room I saw other undergraduates looking as clueless as I was and felt a sense of comfort. I felt assured that it wasn’t just me who felt this way. I wasn’t expected to walk into the room and suddenly be an expert on someone else’s research and it completely was okay to be a little confused. Once I got over my feelings of stupidity and discouragement, I simply started to watch the PhDs collaborate and felt inspired by the way they had so much knowledge and were able to work together to come up with new ideas and solve problems. Watching them made me want to work harder, do more reading, and learn more about the other research happening in the lab. I wanted to be like the researchers sitting at the conference table and this motivated me to want to learn more. With this experience, my advice to my peers and other new first time undergraduate researchers is to not let your lack of knowledge discourage you but to instead let it motivate you to work harder. Do this and maybe one day you’ll find yourself sitting in the center of the room at the conference table at the weekly lab meetings.

EUREKA  Posted by 22 Aug 2017 / 0 comments

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

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