Research Seminars
Haven’t updated in a while. The past few weeks, I’ve been really really realllllly busy getting all the trials done I needed for my poster. Usually I end up in lab for a good portion, if not all, of the night. We had a good idea of what the data was going to look like, but we had to perform a lot of extra trials so certain experiment types would all contain the same number of trials and our data would be statistically relevant. Overall, our results seem to confirm our hypotheses that we set out with in the beginning. Right now I’m trying a bunch of different things to try to get a results I am hoping for, but nothing seems to be working. The summer is the perfect time to do this type of experiment because you need to manipulate the flies each day at different life stages at certain times of day, and that would be a LOT harder (basically impossible) to do during the regular semester unless I was working full-time.
Throughout the Howard Hughes program, many speakers have come to talk to us, usually on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, to, among other things, explore their area of research, describe their career path, and give us the glimpse of what life as a primary investigator is like. Thinking back on these seminars, I realized I had forgotten many of the details of the research of many of the P.I.s, especially the ones that presented near the beginning of the program. However, I don’t think the overall, main purpose of these talks was to give us a supplemental guest-lectured survey course of all of biology. Well, I hope note, because I honestly can’t remember everything each person said. But I did draw some general impressions from hearing each speaker talk.
All the speakers had organized, clear presentations of their research. They came prepared and knew their stuff. But they didn’t feel the need to make it more complicated than it needed to be, considering we (rising sophomores) were the audience. It seems like almost everybody tried to through in a little tongue-and-cheek humor too, or at least keep things light.
Another thing that seemed to differ was how the speakers reached the spot where they are now. Some seemed to have more normal tracks and always wanted to be a scientist. Others did things such as travel around the world I remember Steve Nowicki, Professor of Biology and Dean of Undergraduate Education said at a dinner that he was planning on pursuing music when he entered college. It was that one course in biology that helped persuade him to major in biology and pursue graduate work and a career in the subject after college. I really haven’t had that one course yet…I’m still not totally sure what kind of degree I want to do after college…but I will not digress, more on that to come.
It was also interesting to see how specialized everyone was. Back in the good ‘ole days, guys like Aristotle could write and philosophize about just about everything and still have time on the side to found systems of physics and biology that was the golden standard for just about two millennia. Although Duke instills a sense of high expectations in us, obvious it would be impossible to do this now. It’s kind of too bad careers like this aren’t available right now, as I think it would be fascinating to ponder just about everything. These days, researchers can spend their entire careers studying one step in a particular pathway. As we’ve accumulated a lot more scientific theories since the days of the Greeks, research must be increasingly specialized and more education needed. This also has it’s pro’s though, because you can become an expert in the area you work in and know (at least compared to Aristotle) you are doing extremely advanced work. All of the speakers did a great job of keeping their research in perspective by making sure we took home the importance of the work they were doing. I was actually a little surprised by how much of the research by being done by working with “model organisms” to understand something more in general than just to understand it. It seems that even the most trivial topics have great importance. On that note, it’s too bad Sarah Palin couldn’t make any of the seminars. Maybe she can do Howard Hughes next year since she is without a job now.
