Undergraduate /
"Skeletons in their closet"; Coming Out Of The Closet [5]
Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
Coming Out Of The Closet: A Scientific Transition Into Adulthood
When people talk about having "skeletons in their closet" I always smirk because I actually do. At age six, after convincing my older sister, Abbie, to help me hatch an egg, with a heating lamp in hand, we found a suitable nesting spot: dark, cozy, quiet-my father's office. We knew we were in a restricted area when we came across a picture of a body with the abdomen splayed open, organs visible, and a human skeleton dangling from a shiny hook.
"Do you think it's real, Abbie?" I whispered while carefully turning over the delicate bony hands and touching the yellow stained teeth. Suddenly, the front door opened and we heard "I'm home" from our exhausted father. Finding us hiding behind boxes but sensing our curiosity, my father explained that the skeleton was of a real male (with a narrow pelvis) and began to identify the bones and their mechanical functions.
Growing up surrounded in an atmosphere suffused with science and medicine, I naturally developed an affinity for scientific topics. My love for science initially came from observation. I perused through my father's medical journals, research publications, and pictures from his surgeries. When I became old enough, I shadowed my father on workdays and observed actual operations.
"You might want to sit down, most people feel sick when they first watch," his nurse warned me. However, watching my father operate fascinated me. The grotesque qualities I had pored over in photographs from his office transformed into a finely orchestrated performance to save a life. My dad transformed into a conductor whose confidence, technical skill, and knowledge led his team of nurses and surgeons to a successful outcome. I felt proud of him. I wanted to conduct and experience the same exhilaration of accomplishment.
My transition from observer to performer began in the summer of my junior year. I spent my break as an intern at Professor Marcus Babst's biochemistry lab at the University of Utah. I performed work on yeast cells with the help of senior mentors. Being the youngest and newest, I often felt lost amidst the graduate students, faltering my way around the lab and getting lost when asked for a tube marked with arbitrary letters. Working at the molecular level, each of my mistakes became magnified when projected on the screens of computers and printed as enlarged images. Each day was a new challenge. I struggled to confirm my own hypotheses as more data surfaced. My final project, "Knocking-out," was my last chance to prove the lab and myself. I spent hours researching, picking out the letters of DNA, finding the perfect sequences for my enzymes. I carefully poured agarose gels, smelling the potency of chemicals, which I now recognized. I constructed the lanes that the DNA would be analyzed through, and pipetted the raindrop-sized DNA mix into tiny slots. At last, I turned on the computer to analyze my data. The results displayed, I was successful. I had become my own conductor.
When beginning my research, I was asked, "Why do you want to work in a lab?" At the time, my answer was vague; I wanted to explore a new area of science in a tangible way and witness discoveries. By the end of my internship, I had exceeded my initial expectation and experienced the responsibilities of a real researcher. The lab instilled in me an understanding that scientific advances require risk-taking, constantly learning through trials both successful, but more often, inconclusive. Yet with perseverance, the scientific secrets yield their answers. I embrace this experimental paradigm as a framework for the narrative of my life- to pursue my passion to learn, to solve new puzzles through strategies that I devise and implement, just as I did when attempting to hatch an egg.
