Category: 2018

Hello prospective FRI members and UT students, my name is Chad and I am a
sophomore in the DIY Diagnostics FRI stream. I’ve been a part of this stream for a semester and some change and have really enjoyed my time in the stream. This stream, like many other FRI streams, teaches you plenty of lab skills such as pipetting, analyzing your data, how to conduct proper research, etc. What sets our stream apart however is the community within the lab. Since starting my time here in DIY, I’ve made plenty of friends that I continue to talk to even outside of lab.

One of the coolest parts of DIY to me is that our lab consists of a diverse amount of students. Yes, we have our pre-health students, our bio majors like many other labs; however, our lab has a large focus on computer science which allows you to interact with many peers who may have valuable experience to share and may teach you skills you may not have learned otherwise. I can proudly say I came into DIY with 0 coding knowledge and have since learned and expanded my repertoire of computer science knowledge. We also work with 3D printing which you don’t get exposure to in a normal everyday lab. I’m a pre-dental student and DIY fits really well into any pre-health schedule thanks to the nature of what we research in our lab. The lab is built upon easy diagnostics that you can try to do at home so we are always dealing with common illnesses and bacteria that you may end up working with in a pre-health profession.

Another unsung skill that DIY helps you develop is time management. The lab is a
on-your-own schedule attendance, so you come in when you can to work on your lab hours. This helped me out in my overall experience as a UT student as it helped me learn to organize my projects and prioritize my time spent on certain tasks. Time management is a skill that I feel like many people underestimate and DIY has helped me apply this skill to the rest of my life as well! It can be daunting to worry about lab hours on top of classes, but the flexible schedule allows you to work when you have time. Time-management in lab also teaches you to prioritize certain tasks and keeps you on track of your projects both in and out of lab.

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While we do have your expected lab activities like culturing bacteria as seen below, we
also do a lot of other cool things in lab like 3D printing and studying our environment here on the
UT campus! DIY gives a good mix of traditional lab work with other cool opportunities to learn
some skills that may be outside your comfort zone. I hope you all take a look through what DIY
has to offer and consider our lab as your next community to join here on the 40 acres! I will
confidently say that joining DIY will give you an awesome experience with research and checks
off some lab credits you may be wanting anyways!

As a computer science student, I have faced constant pressure to find my next internship or career opportunity. Almost every day there is a company tabling in the GDC lobby or hosting a recruitment event somewhere. Computer Science majors are often in a world of their own, away from the rest of CNS, where they are encouraged to pursue an internship at one of the “Big 4” and to focus their studies on perfecting their programming skills. We often lose sight of how computer science can be used alongside other natural sciences to directly impact the most basic parts of people’s lives, including their health. I started in FRI in the Computational Intelligence and Design stream. In my first semester, I met many interesting and passionate people. That class was almost entirely computer science majors, and I was excited to talk about hill-climbing algorithms, neural networks, and how these could be used to train computers to make decisions. We had a lot of knowledge and projects, and our mentors were kind and knowledgeable and helped us make it through. At the end of the semester, I teamed up with some friends I made in that class to create an algorithm that makes predictions about emergency response calls. Although our results were not great, I learned a lot doing that project, and I was excited to
continue in FRI my sophomore year. When I found out the stream was discontinued, I knew immediately which stream I wanted to join: Quantum Computing, the cutting edge of computer science research! We were also told we could join DIY Diagnostics, but I blew that off. Biology was far from my favorite science, and the thought of it brought back memories of staying up all night trying to complete a Science Fair project. On one of the last days of the semester, Dr. Riedel came to speak to our class and tell us
why we should transfer into DIY Diagnostics next semester. I sat in the front row and prepared to let my eyes glaze over
while I smiled politely. Strangely, though, I found I was actually interested in what he was saying. His passion about
diagnostics was obvious, and I realized that the machine learning skills I had learned could actually make a big difference
in their research. There was also a certain appeal to being one of the most experienced programmers in the stream by
default.
After meeting with a DIY mentor, I decided to switch into DIY Diagnostics. It is definitely intimidating to be conducting
research in a field I know so little about, but I know my peers will be able to help me with my weaknesses, and vice versa.
This semester I hope I can contribute to the lab community and learn more about the fields of science that I have been less
than enthusiastic about in the past. I am planning to work on a project that uses typing patterns, such as how fast someone
types or how often they make mistakes, to detect Parkinson’s disease, a neurological condition that affects motor skills.
I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead and the friends who will help me along the way.

I don’t know what I want to do with my life; I’ve always been that type of person. So when it came to picking a research stream for the Freshman Research Initiative, I was totally lost. What if I picked a stream and then ended up hating what I did? What if it was boring or too hard? There was everything from fish behavior to quantum computing, but those were too specific for me it felt like I could never truly find something I would want to do. That’s until I saw DIY Diagnostics. Intrigued by the name, I did further research on the internet and saw that DIY Diagnostics that was simply a stream based around creating cheap, at-home tests for anything from the environment to diseases. It was the only stream that I saw that focused on chemistry, biology, and computer science at the same time. Intrigued, I decided to go to the FRI Open House event and check out the DIY Diagnostics booth, and oh man was I impressed. There’s something unexplainably charismatic about Dr. Riedel, the stream research educator, waving a pregnancy test around and talking about it being an end goal for the stream that just gets me hooked on the idea of self-diagnostics. From that day on, I knew that DIY Diagnostics was where I wanted to be. I really thought I would be doing something biology related when I joined FRI. Instead, my project is entirely electronics and coding based, and I LOVE IT! I had never coding or put electronics together before I came to DIY Diagnostics, but being exposed to so many different things in such a diverse stream helps you really figure out what you want to do. I’ve done everything from water quality analysis, to web app coding in this stream, and I’ve loved every moment of it.