Year in Review- 1st Year

This year has been full of a wide variety of new people, places, tasks, and situations.  One aspect of this year which has been very interesting and intellectually challenging has been volunteering in a research lab during second semester. Coming into this position, my only experience with laboratory work had been general chemistry 1, which, as many are aware, just skimmed the surface of lab work. I’ve been working in Dr. Peixuan Guo’s lab alongside graduate students, who have taught me the functionality and maintenance of RNA nanoparticles as a vessel for administering cancer therapy to cancer cells. This involved a lot of use with pipets, agarose gels, and, more recently, cell culture. This is still a challenging position for me (even though my main goals here are to learn how to perform common laboratory techniques), because it is so different from what I was familiar with in the past. However, I have become more comfortable with these processes and the calculations required to accurately perform my tasks, and this work experience has helped me to get a position over the summer where I continue to work in a lab with cell culture and a study of the genetic effects certain drugs may have. I still have a long way to go in my knowledge of pharmaceutical sciences, but I hope to continue to grow and learn through these positions (and future experiences) in order to expand my professional working knowledge on the human body and how it interacts with pharmaceutical treatment.