One of the beautiful and surprising things about life, is that when you take a pause and look back into the past, you often find your current self in places/situations that would have been unimaginable years before. When I first arrived at Northwestern University (NU), all I was excited about was freedom: to live the life I love, to explore the culture and places around Chicago and to follow my own interests. I had a vague sense that I would major in science and perhaps go to graduate school after college. However, none of my expectations were even close to the experience of doing my own research at a lab.
Even after the first quarter, in which I participated in an informal but mandatory department seminar on finding a lab and doing research, I was still not attracted to the idea of finding a lab and working with the stereotypical miserable graduate students who don’t even have a decent amount of time for lunch. But at NU, you just can’t fall behind on career planning too much. After a half-year of sitting around, my advisors and friends started to bug me about finding a lab and doing research. One of my courses even had a mini-research assignment, aimed at prodding people to learn about the research opportunities on campus. So to finish my homework, I took my first steps towards finding a lab, and that’s when I discovered the other side of NU.
Among the vast labyrinth of Tech Institute, in the corridors that don’t get the hourly crowds of students rushing from one class to another, there are dedicated people working all day on their own topic, within intimate groups that share interests and motivation. While we undergraduates spend our time–no matter free time or not–doing crazy activities while struggling to avoid getting run over by the ruthless treadmill of pending deadlines and midterms, there are graduate students (and post-docs) concentrating on science, not as some form of assignment, but as the object of their own interest. I searched on the NU research database and started my lab visiting in alphabet order. I made my first stop at the Amaral lab, talked to the people about their projects, and was attacked by a sudden burst of excitement over one of the projects. So I stayed.
Turns out that joining the Amaral lab is one of the best decisions I’ve made in college. It offers me a different perspective on the subjects that I am currently learning in class and anchors my drifting interest to academia (side effect: exposes me to more swearing…). My lab is like a secret island where I can take a rest in the middle of the torrent of undergraduate life to clear my mind, to stay away from the quest for good grades and studying for exams rather than for myself. It’s a less structured place to concentrate on self-directed scientific interests. As an undergraduate student, it’s also fairly relaxing because there are no worries about funding, or getting results of great impact. Instead, I belong to an intimate, supporting group that cares about my personal development as much as my project. A lab is the perfect place to stop and think about your life, about what you want from the future, and learn, and learn, and learn. Yay! (this last word is just to express that I’m so excited to finish this blog, one of my lab assignment)
And many thanks to Amaralians!
Smoochies!