In the spring semester, I have gotten opportunities to help me further pursue a career in veterinary medicine.

After the Scholars Seminar course where we had an assignment to research some labs we would be interested in, I decided to email a lab over winter break to see if I would able to join in the spring semester. I wanted to join a research lab because I thought that it would better help me understand the process of research, which I feel is especially important to me as a STEM major and pre-veterinary student. I wanted to join the Parasite and Pathogen Ecology Lab specifically because vector-borne diseases impact animals as well as humans, which I thought would be a good opportunity to learn more about animal diseases and veterinary public health, and I was lucky to be accepted by Dr. Pesapane.

In the lab, I was exposed to a lot of new lab procedures, such as DNA extraction and PCR testing. I was able to ask questions about the lab and lab procedures and gain a better understanding of what I would be doing. Dr. Pesapane and the other team members I encountered in the lab gave me confidence in my abilities as I was trusted to help out and eventually get a small assignment without supervision. I gained new perspectives from team members, who despite being in the same lab had different backgrounds and wanted to go different paths in the future. The lab skills I gained could help me in other wet labs in the future, but for now I think there’s still a lot to learn in my current lab and I want to stay in it for the foreseeable future. Next semester, I am hoping to be able to develop my own project within the lab.

For the summer, I will be doing essentially a paid internship at a vet clinic in order to get experience for vet school. I hope that the small clinic environment of the place I am working at will be advantageous for developing skills I could use to work at a vet clinic and for networking with the veterinarians and veterinary staff.