When tasked with selecting an FRI stream I felt very conflicted because lab science had never been a place of comfort for me. My relationship with my identity as a science student was on uneven ground, and I felt out of place among the hoards of Pre Med students who were all certain that they just adored science. DIY caught my eye because it felt like an escape from that culture, and it felt in line with the unconventional. By coming together to create products for general societal wellness it felt like I was working on public health issues, yet by integrating app development and molecular bio-science the stream had a feeling of organized incoherence that made me feel at home. While the learning curve was steep and I felt out of place to start the semester, the community of our DIY cohort was friendly and connected in a way that made my insecurities insignificant, though ever present. As the weeks went on I felt my self more connected with the idea of working in the lab and creating something new, which is why when the time came for class registrations I came back to DIY for a second semester despite it providing none of the requirements for my degree progress. While the first semester of DIY was an important and necessary period of growth, where I struggled through key experiences such as aliquoting, diluting, – and to my greatest chagrin- coding, the second semester of DIY is what made the experience so valuable. The ability to have free reign on a research project was an experience that I likely will not emulate again and by working through the highs and lows of creating novel scientific research that only my team and I had the knowledge of, I expanded my horizons to places I did not think I cared to see just a few short months prior. While our project did not culminate to the results we would have liked to see at the speed we would have wanted them, the opportunity to have created something that did not exist elsewhere in the world changed the way I felt about science. I still don’t feel comfortable calling myself a scientist, and I can definitively say that I do not expect my career path to ever be traditionally scientific in nature, yet in my years beyond DIY I suspect that I’ll keep the ideas, the knowledge, the frustrations, and, most importantly, the curiosity that I gathered along the way in our little lab hidden in the walls of a building far too old yet endearingly arcane.