I’d like to start by thanking Wabash College, Dr. Burton, and Peter Moellor for giving me the opportunity to work in the Aeolosoma lab this summer as I prepare for my senior year and future graduate school endeavors to get my PhD in molecular biology. Through guidance from Dr. Burton, I learned not only bench skills such as preparing slides and using micropipettes but got real experience of how research plans can change. Before the internship began, we took a Clifton Strengths Exam, and two of my top strengths, maximizer and adaptability, ended up shaping almost every part of how I approached the work. We came in the first week with an original plan of using multiple different antibodies with differing drug treatments, but due to not seeing convincing evidence that they were all working properly, we had to pivot our ideas. This is where adaptability first kicked in, since I had to let go of the plan I’d been picturing and find a new way forward without losing momentum. These are setbacks that I will continue to face as I further my career in research, but this summer I acquired the mindset required to navigate these issues in a productive way without getting stuck or frustrated. The biggest thing I took away was a simple quote from Dr. Burton: “Well, those are the results we got, so that is what we are going to use.” This was the hardest part for me to accept, as I had to put aside my bias about what we had expected to happen and try to make conclusions based on what we saw from our experiments. This experience also allowed me to work alongside another student while we were doing research, and even though we had different overall projects going on, we were able to work together to prevent each other from making the same mistakes the other had made, overall making both of us more efficient. My maximizer showed up here, since I was always looking for ways to make our combined time in the lab count for more, whether that meant sharing a shortcut I’d found or catching an error before it cost either of us a day.
