If you are looking for a stream that will help you gain knowledge and grow your independence, DIY Diagnostics is the stream for you! Although being in a lab and doing research can be intimidating, everyone that is a part of the DIY Diagnostics team is very helpful in giving you guidance as you go along with the FRI program.
I personally, had never been in a real lab setting before. I did labs in middle and high school but the teacher would always demonstrate the experiment first and the labs we did were also very simple and part of the curriculum required for the class. I am from McAllen, Texas, so we had very basic labs, maybe six times a year, and that was all I was ever exposed to. Going in with basically no lab experience was extremely intimidating to me because I did not know how to do a lot of the tasks we had to do on the assignments. I was excited, however, to learn lab terminology and feel sure in what I was doing.
I picked this stream because of the exciting research that had been done in the past and also because I felt like we had the most freedom in doing research. Along with actively doing lab assignments, we learn the basics of coding which was very interesting to me. Even though we only learned the basics of coding it is still useful information that you can potentially use in the future, who knows maybe you end up changing your major to computer science! Although it was difficult, I felt like I was solving a puzzle, when something on your app wouldn’t work you would have to go back and see what little mistake might have been made. The entire trial and error process was completely worth it when you finally got your code to run successfully.
Being a part of the research community allowed me to be more independent and lose a fear of asking questions. When you are in lab you are working on the assignments independently so you need to be sure of what you are doing and just follow the steps. I was so used to being told what to do, step by step with demonstration, so working on lab assignments on my own helped me understand the process of the procedures better. I also became more comfortable with asking questions and getting help.
My favorite lab assignment which I found very fun was one where we used the 3D printer. In the first step of that assignment we were allowed to print out anything of our choice, in order to familiarize ourselves with the process of finding the measurements and how the printer worked. I decided I would make a longhorn keychain and add it to my set of keys, and it turned out just how I wanted it to.
Joining the DIY Diagnostics team will help you grow immensely as an individual and allow you to get a feel of how it is to be a part of the research community. I decided to continue with the stream and am now moving onto doing my own research! This is a great way of entering the research world regardless of whether you will like it or not, you will never know unless you try. The idea of making diagnostic materials available for individuals on the daily is a true representation of “What starts here changes the world”