So far with my time through the Health Sciences Research Fellowship, I’ve had a great time getting to know my peers and learn from them. I’ve enjoyed discussing our individual projects and some of the challenges we’ve already faced. Each step is vital and as we continue in our individual projects, we come across different problems, which I’m learning to discuss with my peers in the fellowship. I hope to learn more about new techniques, project ideas, challenges, successes, and more as I communicate with other students interested in similar fields that I am. We all have such different interest, but are working towards a common goal of discovering something new. We’re continuously feeding our passion to dig deeper, ask more questions, learn new methods, and it all begins by listening and talking to one another.
All of us are incredibly different with our personal goals, our majors, our interests, and what we hope to discover and I have already learned so much from my peers. One individual is inducing pain within mice and I found that fascinating. It’s also fascinating to think about the ethical considerations of each project and how human versus animal studies are run. Another fascinating project I learned about was inducing OCD in mice as well and learning how lesioning a specific part of the brain can affect their behavior. There are so many fascinating projects we’re all working on and there’s so much to learn about different psychological studies, clinical studies, and animal studies. We’re all searching for the why and the how of things, but in many different ways, and I’ve already gained new insight into new methods for our various projects.
Working with our peers really provides an interdisciplinary approach within our research fields and our interests in general. I’ve talked to other students in the Brackenridge Fellowship and the SHURE-grid program as well and have gained new insights into projects not tied into healthcare, which I do not get to see very much. There are a lot of different other fields and so many different projects in all sorts of areas, such as math, business, sociology, and more and it really shows the impact of research in every aspect of our life, no matter what field or career we’re involved in. I even learned about an individual doing a project on the math of the Rubik’s cube, which I found fascinating as I never even knew there were that many formulas behind solving it. Also, learning to discuss our projects with our peers has already taught me more about communication and how to present our research in terminology everyone can understand. An important part of research is talking about it and over the last couple weeks, I’ve learned better ways to present my project and talk through the specific methods, the objective, and what I hope to learn from it. All in all, I’ve really enjoyed making new friends and learning more about different projects, techniques, and problem-solving skills from all the peers in my cohort and other cohorts!