During my time at Longwood, I’ve been lucky to get the chance to be apart of research for multiple semesters. This has ranged from doing PRISM over the summer, to joining Dr. Beach and his lab for the past three semesters. Over this time, I have grown so much as a researcher, in both the skills I’ve obtained, but also my confidence in performing them. I’ve been given the chance to become independent in my thinking and the direction in which I take on projects. I’ve really enjoyed my time in the lab and I hope to get a job working in one after I graduate. I’m hoping the experience I’ve gained these past years allows me to have a better chance of getting a job.

I was able to experience PRISM the Summer of 2021, and while it wasn’t strictly biology related, I did learn a lot of being an independent researcher. There were a lot of responsibilities placed on me, such as researching background on anything related to neuromuscular fatigue and repeated sprint exercises, writing up a plan for the summer, creating methods for how we wanted to set up our experiment, figuring out how to use equipment and creating a poster and final paper. While I had some similar experience in classes, this was my first time where there was this sole expectation of me to perform as if this were a job, which made it more daunting in way. However, I learned a lot about time management what style of research worked for me and how to collaborate with a partner. It also allowed me to feel really confident in myself and my work because this was something I had just spent the last 5 days a week, for 8 weeks, working on. I hadn’t really committed to a project like that before and it was really cool to see it built from the ground up. This allowed to present my poster with more confidence and gain experience in a professional setting.

From there, I was able to conduct research for three semesters with Dr. Beach. The research focused on bacteria in rainwater harvesting systems, and has been very developed and refined along the way. We had been looking into methods of developing ways of identifying and quantifying bacteria that is both more specific and efficient. Our goal was to help with identifying potentially pathogenic bacteria that could be present in the systems. We first worked with metagenomics, where we made a proposal poster of what we wished to accomplish. From there, we were able to develop it further and produce actual data, which we were able to present at an American Society for Microbiology conference. This was my first experience performing in a professional setting outside of Longwood, and I honestly really enjoyed it. I liked showing other people in the field what my group was working on and what we wanted to accomplish, but also seeing what everyone else’s projects were. It gave me the chance to get more experience with presenting in front of others and to receive feedback on my poster. Below was our poster that we presented!

Along with, over the past few semesters, I’ve gotten the chance to gain experience with writing research grants to receive funding for various project. This current semester I wrote my third grant, and it has definitely gotten easier. Now I can add it to my resume as a skill to hopefully make me a stronger candidate.