STEM Seminar

As the year goes on I am learning more about the countless thing this university has to offer. For this post, we were encouraged to explore a STEM related seminar that was being held at the university. Every week and for almost any major there are seminars that are held around campus. A lot of them are geared towards graduate students in that area of study, which could make it hard for someone like me to understand. The seminars are usually held by a department and the person that speaks is typically someone talking about their research.

When I was looking through the sessions I read over all the descriptions in detail. I really wanted to try and pick a seminar I thought I would be able to at least take something away from. Many of the topics of the seminars were very interesting. The one I chose was the BioPhysics seminar, Trade-offs in the Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance. Based off the description I thought it was interesting, and I had some idea of what antibiotic resistance is and how it can be observed. I was excited to go to the seminar and be able to learn something without the traditional classroom setting.

I arrived to the seminar a little bit early just to make sure I was in the right place, since I had never been to the building before. I only had arrived 15 minutes early but there was no one to be found in the lecture room. However, slowly but surely more people arrived to the session. One of my first observations was the ratio of
males to females that were attending the seminar. There were far less women in the room, which I feel tends to be a trend in some STEM fields like Physics. I really enjoy being in a STEM field myself and I love that even though women may be the minority in their field they can identify with that. Often times that helps them excel and be able to empower other women who may be pursuing a career in a similar field. There were, what I assumed to be, mostly graduate students, and professors that also were attending this seminar.

When the presenter introduced himself he talked a lot about his eduction, where he worked and where he did the research that was the premise of the seminar. The PowerPoint he went through was very easy to follow and emphasized the important findings. The presentation went over research about how the bacterial species reacted to different applied drugs and the components of those drugs that cause it to react and adapt the way it did. I found it very interesting that they were able to break it down to the point where they knew the exact proteins that were producing this biological response in resistance. From this his team was able to develop a drug that had the most optimal components to make sure there is the lowest chance of the species developing resistance to the drug. I was really glad I was able to take something away from this seminar even if I wasn’t able to understand every single thing that was talked about.

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