I had the awesome opportunity to sit and just talk with the PhD candidate with whom I work with closest.
M: Where are you from? R: I’m originally from India M: What did you want to be when you were little? R: I wanted to be a Medical Doctor M: Do you have any siblings? R: I have an older sister M: Did your parents want you to be anything? R: Not really, my mom didn’t want me to be a doctor, because in India, in order to be sucessful you have to have a relative in the medical field and we didn’t have any. She thought that if I became a medical doctor I would really suffer. M:What was your academic plan? M:What did you end up doing academically? I got my bachelors degree in Engineering with a major in biotechnology. I then went on to get my masters in biological science again with a major in biotechnology and now I’m working on getting my PhD. M: How long will it take you to get your PhD? R: For this department it takes an average of 5 years. M: How long have you been at this research institution? R: I’ve been here 3 years so I probably have around 2 more. M:What was your first job? R: I was a Quality Analyst at a Pharmaceutical company. However it was more of a volunteer position, I wasn’t actually paid. M:How many cities have you lived in? 3 M:Which ones? R: Banglore (India), Lowell over in Massachusetts,and Albany. M:What’s one fun fact about yourself? R: Hm, that’s a bit difficult I’m actually very good at hula hooping. M: If you were to give advice to someone who’s considering going into the biology whether as as a Medical Doctor or as a Researcher what would you tell them? R: I’d say do as you’re doing and experience all that you can about your field of interest ahead of time. I almost became a medical doctor but looking back I probably would have been miserable in medical school. M: Why don’t you think you would have enjoyed medical school? R: I think I’m just a better match for biological research I wouldn’t want to memorize tons of rote information. M: What’s your favorite part of research? R: It’s one of the few fields where you can have a genuine scientific question and you get to spend your days chasing after the answer. M: Is there anything else not covered that you’d say is important? R: I’d just say that one of the major driving factors to get into research was the loss of my father to cancer during undergrad. He passed away within 6 months after diagnosis and that left me with a “What the heck?” feeling. I though that we were so advanced when it came to medical science that even if we couldn’t cure cancer we could at least prolong a patients life. Finding out that wasn’t the case was a shock and motivated me to research cancer. M: Can I ask what kind of cancer he had? R: He had prostate cancer which is typically one of the cancers that you can have and still live with for a very long time but because he had a rare strain he died very quickly. M: I’m very sorry about that. That is an incredible motivator to come to work everyday. R: Absolutely M: Thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with me!
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I went to turn in my findings from Russ Carsten's file and Rakshitha informed me I'd make a tiny mistake that was going to cost me hours of work. When cross referencing this spreadsheet with the one for alpha 3 I used the Gene column (Red arrow). The problem with that is that column is just one name for any given gene and there's actually up to 5 or 6 names for the same gene! We're kind of in the dark ages when it comes to naming genes because we're discovering new ones everyday. Some genes are "discovered" more than once because they're important to one or more (or freakin 5) different functions.
So essentially I had to go back and make sure for each of the hundreds genes that I didn't look at the other names for that the name wasn't on the alpha 3 spread sheet... I had my work cut out for me. I've kind of spent the last 2 years of my life worshiping the Excel SpreadSheet. In my last project from my junior year, which you can find here, I used spreadsheets to statistically analyze the similarities and differences between patients with Hypertriglyceridemia and Pancreatitis and those without. The results of that work has been submitted to be published to a medical journal and I'll know by spring if it actually has been published.
This year I've been working with a lot of different spread sheets and this is the latest example. This is an image of part of the 200+ line spread sheet I've spent hours staring at. Sometimes science research is about as exciting as it sounds... |
Michaela BentonI'm lucky enough to go to this amazing school that has this amazing program that lets me learn amazing things. Archives
December 2017
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