When I applied to IUPUI, one of the largest drawing factors was access to research opportunities. My freshman year of college, as a First Year Biology Apprentice, was the first experience with research. My first year, I primarily did lab chores and helped the graduate students with small tasks of their research projects. However, the summer after being the First Year Biology Apprentice, I decided I would like to continue working with the same lab. So, I applied for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Grant. This grant provided me a stipend over the summer to work on my own research project. As a part of receiving this grant, I had to write a grant proposal. This was my first experience with writing a grant proposal and with serious scientific writing. My mentor, Dr. Meyer encouraged me to do many preliminary readings on relevant scientific journals before writing the proposal. He encouraged me to make notes of aspects that I didn’t understand and either do further readings to understand or ask for clarification. Reading so many articles at this level really helped me to understand what my project was going to be. I received the grant, and I began working with one of the graduate students on a portion of her project. The basis of my project was on classifying retinal ganglion cell subtypes and identifying their relations to glaucoma and other retinal diseases.
Also, through the UROP Grant, I had the opportunity to utilize technology and cell culture to obtain data supporting my project to present at a research symposium. Presenting my research helped me to further understand my research through explaining it to others who have different levels of scientific backgrounds. I got the amazing news that some of the work that I helped the graduate student with was published, and I was listed as a co-author. It was published with Nature, a prominent scientific publication, under the title, “Differential susceptibility of retinal ganglion cell subtypes in acute and chronic models of injury and disease.” |