Immunology Research

My senior year of high school I worked as a volunteer research assistant every day after school for a post-doc in my mom’s lab. The work coincided with the material I was learning in AP biology, and was a very interesting application of physics and chemistry to make discoveries about cancerous cells. The work I did typically involved staining slide in order to take pictures of the cell with a special microscope where the oxygen level, tumor cells, and white bloods were clearly visible. I learned the entire process from the chemical preparation and experiment, to collecting data through image microscopy, and analysis of the data with a computer program. I even made the statistical representation of the data that ended up being published in an abstract in a major cancer journal. The most interesting part of the job was observing the process of designing a thesis and the discovery of new scientific knowledge to add to the breadth of research on cancer. This exposure to academic work showed me the struggles and the rewards of dedicating your career to research. This experiment cemented my interest in research; however, it also left me with doubts in pursuing a career in academia.