Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Note to the reader: so my PI, Dr. Steve Haase, sort of doesn’t like interviews… and was conveniently very busy most of this week. He replied to my email with, “You know, you should probably just interview Sara. It would be more interesting anyway.” And so, with a laugh and some trepidation, the wonderful Sara Bristow, a 2nd-year grad student and my mentor in the lab, agreed to talk to me. Me recording the conversation sort of freaked her out. But I think we had fun anyway :) And I’ll delete the recording, as promised. Potentially I can make Steve do an interview next week. Until then...

Where did you do your undergrad?

I did my undergrad at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. It’s a fun place. And I was a biology major. It was kind of strange being a biology major, but not being premed, because everyone biology is a premed at Georgetown. Actually I think that’s pretty common everywhere, I know here at Duke it is. And so not knowing really what I wanted to do, knowing I definitely didn’t want to go into medical school put me in kind of a weird position, because everyone else was like, “I’m going to medical school, and that’s why I’m taking all of these classes!”, and I was just taking them because I liked biology.

Have you always liked biology?

Yeah. Yeah since I was, oh man… I think the first class I ever had biology in was in 5th grade, and a student teacher came in, and I just fell in love. She ended up working at the school, and taught my 7th and 8th grade science class. So that was really cool, and since then I’ve sort of taken every biology I could – or science I could, and so I hit college and started on biology.

What made you decide biology in particular, compared to other sciences?

Well, compared to chemistry and physics, I felt like I understood it better, and it was sort of easier for me to relate it to the world around me, you know. I could look at water and be like “oh, the molecular formula is two hydrogens and one oxygen”, but when you think about water and how important it is to life, and think about how we use it in our daily lives, that’s pretty cool. That’s what got me interested.

What was your favorite class in when you were an undergrad?

I would have to say intro biology, because it the first day of class, my professor stood up on the desk, in front of the whole class of 200 of us, and pretended to be an antibody. That was really cool, and he was just really captivating, and kept my interest in biology. It was a really hard course, he made the tests really hard, mainly to weed people out. And so I think if I hadn’t enjoyed that course, I probably would have changed majors to something else. Not quite sure what. But I probably would have changed majors.

Do you have any idea at all what you would have done? Like, if you weren’t in grad school right now, what would you be doing?

Probably teaching… maybe high school. I toyed with the idea of taking two years off and doing Teach for America. Actually as a college student, as a senior, it was mandatory that we had to do a thesis, and there were three options. You could do a research from looking at journal articles and coming up with a theoretical experiment, you could do research in a lab, or you could do a teaching thesis, and I went into a high school in D.C. and taught biotechnology. And so, that kind of got me a little interested in teaching, and I seriously thought about doing TFA for a while. But, I ended up wanting to go to graduate school, because then I can do research and I can teach at the same time. I can TA, and I get to mentor, like you and Chenchen, and it’s really cool. I hope I don’t mess you up too much, because this is my first time doing it. But it’s been pretty cool so far to see how those two things come together.

*Insert long discussion about how I want to teach and do research too! And how I’ve always thought Teach for America is awesome. And how it’s cool that you can do both teaching and other careers with each other. *

It’s pretty cool how it comes together, because in graduate school, not only are you required to TA, but even if you’re not assigned to mentor, you’re always working together as a group. You know, if someone has a problem, it’s not just you figuring it out on your own. It’s very collaborative. It should be a very collaborative work experience. I mean, like Yuan-Jie will come up and say, “How do you do this?”, and I’m like, “Well, I do it this way, but Laura does it this way, and Mark does it a different way,” and so there’s not one right way. Which is what’s pretty cool about science. Because with math, or physics – there’s certain equations that you have to follow, certain procedures. With biology, it’s, “How will I do it? Will it get me the right answer? I sure hope so…”

What do you like to do in your free time?

Well, I like to play volleyball, so I’m on a volleyball team – summer league, we play on the sand. I like just relaxing… during the summer I like to go to the pool, the beach, I like running and reading, I’m trying to start knitting. That’s been a challenge – knitting is a challenge. You have to have a lot of patience and discipline. Yeah, I just like hanging out… mainly volleyball. Played in high school, I tried to start a team in college, but my friends don’t really like volleyball. I didn’t want to put in the time commitment of a travel team because every weekend, you’re gone. The nice thing about being a graduate student - I guess it depends on the lab you’re in - with Steve, you can pick your hours. If you need a mental health day you can take it.You can work on weekends if you want, you can work four really long days and have a three day weekend, so that’s the good thing about grad school.

Are there any big stories of catastrophes or experiences or learning that you want to share, from undergraduate, from working here?

Like bad things that have happened in the lab?

Sure. I mean, things that somebody could learn from. Or things that made you stop and think, or realize something about what you were doing. That’s a really loaded question, I’m sorry.

Well, in terms of experiments, so I’m working with fruit flies, and I’ve been trying to do these crosses. I have one gene in one fly and another gene in another fly, and I want to get them both in the same fly, and it takes four separate crosses for that. To keep things very simple, you use - since they’re diploid, you have your mutation on one chromosome, and on the other one you have a balancer, so there can’t be any recombination. And so what I was using as a balancer was a phenotype where the flies have no eyes. And I’m doing a cross, and I’m not getting any of the flies that I think I should be getting, and I’m like, “What is going on here?”, and I realize that the mutation I’m working on is cell cycle related. Well, to have no eyes, you have no division of your eye cells… so, two mutants in the cell cycle together make it so that you can’t get any flies. So, I had been doing the cross the wrong way for like 2 months… so that’s a learning experience. It really teaches you to think about how you set things up, and the details of, “Oh, I’m just going to use this so that everything stays the same.” But you have to make sure that what you have controls for anything.

What else… I broke a lot of glass in my organic chemistry lab. It’s a very hard class, and the labs are four hours long, and you’re under the hood all the time. And the first day – it’s the only day where the lab professor will walk around, and I broke like three things on that day. I left crying, and I was like, “I don’t know if I can do this!” Because I realized that to take a biology class I wanted to take, I had to take organic chemistry, you know? So I left crying and, well, you just realize that it happens to everybody… it just happened to me a lot that day.

*Insert story about how I broke a lot of glass in chemistry workservice. You should ask me. It’s a funny story. Anyway.*

It kind of fueled my fire to try harder, which I think I like that about my personality. I don’t think a lot of people have that. So all of my experiences have taught me determination, I think, which is important in science. As you saw with Chenchen, it can get very, very upsetting if something isn’t working and you can’t figure it out, but it happens to everybody. And when it works, the joy is so great - how great it feels to make something work is really cool.

Last question. I’m trying to pick which one of the fun ones I can use. Okay, if you could be any flavor of ice cream, what would you be?

I would have to be – does it have to reflect my personality? I just really like chocolate. And it would have to be the chocolate ice cream from this ice cream store at my dad’s beach. Because it is perhaps the best chocolate I’ve ever had in my life. So it would have to be chocolate from King’s Ice Cream – *I pointed out that she's wearing a shirt from the ice cream store*  – oh yeah, there you go. Yup, chocolate. Their chocolate is so good, I don’t know what they do to it, but, yeah. That would be it.

Well, thanks for being a sport.

That wasn’t so painful after all!

No! Of course not.