—•—

My SHURE-Grid cohort is comprised of three other students—Daley Fraser, Jason Vo, and Kimberly Chen. Over the last few weeks, having worked (and lived) alongside them for the greater portion of my days, I’ve slowly come to understand them and how they operate in a team setting. Each of them has their own unique quirks that they bring to the table, and as time goes on, I find myself impressed, time and time again, by the amount of effort they put in, and the quality of work they produce. I know I can trust them with my thoughts and opinions, and I can also trust them to stick around whenever I need to be brought back down to earth.

1. I’m honestly hoping to gain a little bit of perspective from the other Brackenridge researchers. It’s always interesting to me from a STEM perspective what other people are passionate about, to the extent that they’d be willing to dedicate their entire summer to answering that one crucially important question. I don’t get to see people out of my major (bioengineering) all that often, so it’s really refreshing to hear about what other people are working on, especially if they’re subjects I take interest in.

2. So, this question is a little weird because I’m SHURE-Grid, so 3 other people in the cohort (technically 7 but don’t worry about it) are working on pretty much the exact same thing as I am. Comparing my project to that of other students is a bit difficult because they propose their thesis and base their research off of something they’re passionate about, whereas I opted in to the program looking to gain experience in a field I wasn’t familiar with, and have slowly acquired a passion for cybersecurity in the last few weeks. To my knowledge, I don’t think any other students outside of SHURE are working on cybersecurity, though I know one student is working on algorithms (but that’s more of a math thing). I’m particularly interested in the Alzheimer’s research and the history of trans medicine research because I did a paper of my own a few months back on Alzheimer’s medication, and because I’m part of the lgbtqia+ community and love to see representation.

3. We talk a lot about multi-disciplinary team building in both AoM (the Art of Making, a class I took last semester) and SHURE. I see firsthand how it contributes to our discussions and brainstorm sessions—it’s fascinating to see the variety in perspective. Kimberly’s a finance major, Daley and Jason are both computer science though Jason was a mechanical engineer at one point, and I’m a biomedical engineer, so we all come at the problem from vastly different angles. Obviously, that means we won’t see eye-to-eye on everything, but I’d much rather that be the case because it allows room for discussion.