Week 10 Blog

Hello and welcome to my last blog post. I am working on my final presentation and paper and reflecting on all the experiences I’ve had this trimester. I thought I’d conclude this blog with some closing thoughts and advice for anyone doing a senior project in the future:

Advice

• Do this project in any order you like. It works just as well to choose an internship you really want and then choose a research question based on the internship than it does to choose very specific question you want to research and then choose an internship to help answer that question
• If you are contacting someone you like about an internship, consider not throwing out the word internship right away and first saying how interesting their work seems and how you’d like to learn about it for a senior project. If they seem interested in your senior project and helping you out, work up to asking for an internship
• Because of the previous point I made, start contacting people about internships early on
• Don’t be disappointed if you can’t get all the benefits you wanted you see other employers having during your unpaid internship opportunity. I would have loved to have a badge, free parking, and full access to certain lab equipment and software but I have to remember that I am not truly working for anyone and am benefiting from getting to learn from other employees
• Keep daily reflections of what you have done. It is easy to forget and you never know what details could come in handy for blogs, conversations, the syllabus assignment, your final presentation, etc.
• Be prepared to talk about your topic. Anytime you mention to anyone whether it be your internship mentor, friends outside of school, or neighbors that you are not doing traditional school this trimester or are working on a senior project, they will want to hear all about it. So be prepared
• Choose a topic you are genuinely interested in. You will have to do so much with this topic throughout the year. This is not the kind of project where you should just choose a topic that simply sounds impressive
• Take advantage of this senior project as a good talking point. The people at the NIH loved hearing about my senior project and it is something I am using to stay in contact with some of the people I met there. In general, there was hardly anyone I talked to about this senior project who didn’t say, “I wish I could have done something like this in high school”

And…most importantly

• Choose to do this project if you are having second thoughts. You won’t regret it!

And if you’re still reading and want to hear more about cancer misconceptions, here is a conclusion to that:

My “Take” on Cancer Misconceptions

The main cancer misconceptions I see in the media and from conversations with people is the idea that things like cell phones cause cancer (and people often phrase it that way rather than say “are linked to cancer”) and that cancer is almost always deadly. People think cancer is an incurable death sentence and that while constant research is being done, the research is going nowhere. I have learned through my internship that this last part is not true at all and that research is making a lot of progress and lot’s of research is often done surrounding each patient’s case.

Thanks for reading.