One
day during a meeting with my mentor, I brought up the subject of possible
internship opportunities. Little did I
know that my mentor had many ideas but not enough time to work on them all, and
for that reason, was looking for students interested in the research. I listened carefully as she explained each of
the projects that she wanted to complete and one in particular piqued my
interest. This research would involve
examining the MRIs of subjects genotyped for a gene which increases the risk of
Alzheimer’s disease in its carriers, and try to determine how having this gene
affects the white matter areas of the brain. All of which sounded very
interesting to me, both because of my interest in the medical field and my
fascination with the workings of the brain.
After
my graduation, I plan on attending medical school and my work on this research will
likely help me to stand out from the other applicants because I was able do
hands-on research in the medical field, something few undergraduates are given the
opportunity to do. Due to my experience
I am now much more knowledgeable about the research process and what I should
be able to expect from future career opportunities. But most importantly, my time spent on this
study has shown me that though the scientific research process can be wearisome
and at times downright meticulous, the results are very rewarding. This knowledge helped to confirm for me that
I had made the correct career choice.
My
weekly schedule varied widely depending on which step of the process I was
currently on.
In
the early stages of my research, my weeks involved writing and running various
codes that ran things from textural analysis of the MRIs, to extracting just
the brain tissue from the MRI’s, to the overlapping process of the white matter
tracts. Once the coding was finished,
there was about a week break where I had to wait for the program to finish
analyzing the data. More recently, I
have been transferring the data to Excel spreadsheets in order to organize it
for the final remaining step in the process which is the data analysis. This will involve using t-distributions to
search for the differences in the white matter areas between carriers and
non-carriers of the gene.
Until last week I had been working
completely unaware of which patients had the gene we were looking for and which
didn’t. When I received the spreadsheet
with the information allowing me to separate them into two distinct groups, I
discovered that the three of the subjects whose MRI’s I had been working with had not been genotyped
and thus did not provide valid data and needed to have their information
deleted from the records I had compiled.
This really goes to show that you can’t predict what is going to happen;
anything could come along and alter the experiment, and although this time the
result was negative, that isn’t always the case.
