How DIY Diagnostics Shaped My College Experience

I vividly remember the day I got into DIY diagnostics. It was sometime in late April and me and my choir friends had just landed in Florida for our senior trip to Disney World. As we filed into the bus to go to our hotels, I heard the satisfying ding of a mail notification. When I checked, the email said “Congratulations! You have been placed in the ‘DIY Diagnostics’ FRI Stream for Spring 2023.” And the rest was history.

The reason I chose DIY diagnostics over all the other streams was because of its noble cause. The goal of the DIY diagnostics stream is to create simple diagnostics that anyone can use, including people with little to no medical or scientific expertise. In particular, the DIY research initiatives have a strong emphasis on developing affordable diagnostic goods in the aim of reducing the racial, social, and economic gaps in the diagnostic health sector caused by access and cost difficulties.

Being a part of the DIY diagnostics stream has provided me with so many learning experiences and I truly believe that it has helped me succeed at UT. For example, being a part of this vast research community has allowed me to get a head start on gaining hands-on experience and developing practical skills that can be valuable when conducting research in the future. Also, DIY diagnostics provides students with opportunities for professional development, such as presenting research findings at conferences like the Undergraduate Research Forum or publishing papers in academic journals. These experiences can be valuable additions to students’ resumes and help them stand out in the job market.

I also wanted to mention that of all the streams, DIY Diagnostics has one of the best professors, Dr. Riedel. He understood that as students, we have lives outside of school and lab and that we’re all human and it’s natural for us to mistakes. He genuinely paid attention to feedback from his students and made changes or modifications to our work accordingly and even gave us extensions on assignments if something went wrong.

When I first started the school year, I was so worried about whether I would be able to do well in this course, but with the help of Dr.Riedel, the peer mentors, and my other lab mates, I was able to take things at my own pace, make mistakes, learn from them, and eventually succeed. In terms of technical concepts, I’ve learned so many cool things like qPCR, DNA isolation, LAMP, and using javascript to make apps, but more importantly, I’ve developed skills like teamwork, documentation, communication, time management, critical thinking, and more. In the end, I realized that lab wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be and that research can actually be fun once you know what you’re doing. Sure, having to redo experiments isn’t fun, but getting the right results after previous failed attempts is so satisfying and it made me realize why I wanted to go down the pre-med path in the first place.

My time in DIY diagnostics was one of the most challenging and also one of the most rewarding experiences of this year, and it will be a college experience that I’ll never forget.