At the beginning of second semester, I started working at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and started working on a project under Aynara Wulsin, a MSTP student at the University of Cincinnati. I worked at the lab twice a week from the beginning of February to the ending of May. My part of the project was to analyze the data. After my researcher exposed mice to chronic stress such as drowning or food/ water shortage, a part of the mouse’s adrenal glands would be sectioned and put on slides for analysis. Each section was to be viewed under a confocal microscope and “good” neurons or neurons that were alone and not in contact with any other neurons were to be chosen and analyzed for the number of dendrites and the length of each dendrite.
The Project The project looked at how chronic stress would affect the female brain. In order to test this, mice were exposed to differing stress environment such as drowning or starvation. Some animals would only be exposed to these stress factors either in their childhood or in their adulthood and some animals would be exposed in their childhood and re-exposed in their adulthood. The goal of this project is to see whether long term exposure will lead to slower reactions during activities and to see if length of dendrites are affected and if the dendrite type is changed or affected meaning if a dendrite develops spines.
My Learning
Resilience. Research is in no way perfect, the project never proceeds on the path that you want it to and being able to overcome those drawbacks and still being able to find the silver lining within that failure is true resilience. Through the actions of my researcher I learned the most. She taught me that there were many times when her projects did not turn out as she expected but from that she found another path, she took the project in a different turn than original and that changed project is what I am working on. Personally, from this, I learned that life is like a research project. Nothing ever happens as expected and somehow we have to work something out of the unexpected turns. I have learned that it takes a lot to not be bought down by the failures that I experience but however, being able to find that silver lining and realize that this is not the end of an opportunity but merely a different path is character building.
Patience. Most of the work that I did for the project was tedious and time consuming. I worked at the lab twice a week and each time I spent close to five hours either taking pictures of the neurons on the microscope or analyzing the images that I took. Both of these tasks were very tedious. At first, working with the microscope and imaging the neurons took a lot of time and I was very slow, only doing 3-4 slides in 5 hours; however, as time passed, I became much quicker at it and tended to do 6-7 slides in a sitting. When analyzing the images, each dendrite had to accounted for and the location of the dendrite in relation to the axon and the length of the dendrite had to be manually recorded. Again, very tedious. Through it all, I learned to be patient with my work and not rush through it and risk the chance of messing up the data. I bought this patience over from the lab to my school setting and put it to use when studying or doing my work which has helped me notice small details and concentrate on learning from my work instead of just finishing it.
Hard Work. It is not just perseverance, it is also about being confident in your work and doing it wholeheartedly. Also something that my mentor taught me. The way she talks about her research and what she aims to do with that research is truly inspiring. She showed me that you do not necessarily have to be the smartest person in the room to get awesome opportunities, you just have to love what you are doing and do it confidently. Confidence is truly the key to success.
I someday aim to find something that I love so deeply and I hope that through the years of working on this project, it will become something that becomes a deep part of who I am. I have learned so much from my researcher and from the project itself, I cannot wait to see what lessons the next.