“Really Might Change the World”

College can be quite the tumultuous experience. Organizations coming at you from every square inch of Speedway, parties every night of the week, and homework galore. It’s important that in the middle of such an exciting and hectic time, we find a place that we feel like we really belong. With new experiences left and right, we all really need to find a community that we can root ourselves in and call a home of sorts. For the past year, that home has, for me, been DIY.

FRI started out sort of funnily for me. I walked into my first day of college, not having known a thing about FRI. I stepped into my UGS303 class, and immediately all around me, people were bursting in conversation about FRI. “What stream do you want to join?”, “Which one’s the coolest?”, and all the like. And then there was me, asking, “What’s FRI?” Apparently, the program I was enrolled in automatically enlisted me into the FRI program. And quite honestly, that was one of the luckiest things that has yet to happen to me in college.

To be quite honest, I didn’t expect much from FRI and DIY Diagnostics at first. I picked the stream almost on a whim, having taken only cursory glances at the brief stream descriptions and choosing whichever one I thought was most interesting. Coming into DIY, I treated it as just another class. I thought that FRI would just be some more work to do in the homework- filled bowl of college. I have never been so glad to have been proven so wrong.

As the first semester in DIY progressed, the seemingly random and endless plethora of Skill Developments really start to come together as a whole, and you’ll be glad you did them. Unlike a lot of other labs, DIY Diagnostics is far from single-minded in its focus. The stream is extremely diverse, learning a multitude of skills and applicable research techniques, and even figuring out a thing or two about coding! The curriculum is amazingly expansive, working on a qPCR reaction one day, and working on creating your very own app the next. As cool as the work is, though, it still is quite difficult. You struggle and toil with the people around you, and everyone in the stream really starts to bond. So much time is spent with these people that you are really given the opportunity to get to know everyone, as daunting as that may sound at first. The second semester is even better, as the curriculum becomes a lot more freeform. Come second semester, you have the freedom to choose and start your own project. While we are all part of DIY, we also get the chance to become more like individual researchers, and I think that is a breathtaking opportunity all on its own. DIY really gives you the possibility to bring your ideas to life, and the chance to turn your science into reality. DIY is not just another school chore, not just another obligation that you have to take on. It is a truly worthwhile experience, and the year you spend with it really does just fly by. By the end of it all, a few dozen strangers come together to form a little community all their own, and you really get out of DIY and FRI what you put into it. Looking around at everyone and everything coming together, I felt that for the first time while I’ve been at UT, I really started to believe that, yeah, what starts here really might change the world.