Lab Partner has no “End”!

Personally, I chose DIY Diagnostics as my number one choice stream because I loved the variety of experiments that I would get to perform. Other labs have ongoing research during the Spring semester, but DIY dives into different projects (from sampling Waller Creek, to extracting DNA from your own saliva, to coding) and you truly get to choose what you are passionate about, and continue it into the Fall semester. The Freshman Research Initiative is 100 percent one of the best ways to find out if you want to pursue research as a career, because you get to work on your own project starting when you’re only 18 years old! You get to see the hardships, the successful moments, the various interesting experiments that other people are working on, and more through FRI.

When I first joined the lab, I didn’t know many people there and didn’t know what to expect for that semester. That quickly turned around when Dr. Riedel provided such a team-building environment to work in. For all the skills developments you can work in teams, which not only aids in facilitation of getting results, but also fosters friendships. Like they say, girlfriends/boyfriends can end, friends can end, but lab partner has no end! 😉

One of my favorite parts of DIY is having a completely diverse group of people that have creative solutions to many problems. Currently, my lab partner and I are working on a project that investigates exosomes and MicroRNA in saliva as a potential diagnostic tool for various diseases. For sample collection, we have to get people to spit approximately 3 mL into a collection tube for us. One of the funniest things is watching people reach that 3 mL volume (which is actually quite a lot!) and complain the entire time that they don’t have enough saliva in their mouth. Something that I love about the people in my lab is that they decided to get creative with producing more saliva, and came up with various theories. One group of people searched up photos of hamburgers and other fast food in order to stimulate saliva production in their mouth, while another person (whose mother is a dentist) said that licking the sides of your cheeks will help produce more saliva. This is a simple example, but it is extremely incredible being in an environment with people that think differently from you. Whenever you have a question or are stuck on a step for your project, it is easy to ask the group of researchers nearby, and someone is bound to think of an original solution.