Adventures in Bio science

Yesterday I went to a garden expo at Rolling Ridges Nursery in Webster Groves. The Garden Expo had around 20 booths of landscape companies, gardeners, and volunteer opportunities. Organizations like Gateway Greening (group that creates bed gardens around the St. Louis area), Saint Louis Parks and Recreation sponsoring their Garden Program, STLCC Horticulture, and several landscaping companies. I wanted to go to this event because I’ve been interested in pursuing landscape architecture as a career and wanted to get some more background about plants and landscaping. One business at the expo that stood out to me was Wallflower Design. A landscape design company that designs residential yards and gardens. The company offers design and horticulture services to customers. It was cool to see their hand drawn landscape designs and learn more about their design process. Another cool booth there took honeysuckle branches and turned them into tables and other furniture. It was cool to see how thi...

Yesterday, I went to the Health Careers Fair at Washington University St. Louis. The event was only in the morning and consisted of a fair, panel, and lunch. During the fair there was booths set up around the gymnasium with different healthcare careers like pharmacy, pediatrics, nursing, physical therapy, audiology, and many more. I really enjoyed the pediatrics booth because they had a lot of hands on activities. I was able to look inside the ear and the eye, as well as give a baby mannequin chest compressions and oxygen. Besides getting to try different things the booth was super informative compared to the others. Following the fair was a discussion about gene editing. My favorite part of the discussion was the perspective of a scientist and an ethics professional. Gene editing creates a lot of controversy about whether it is ethical to alter these genes to create the “designer babies”. Hearing both perspectives gave me good insight to help develop my own opinion about the boundarie...

So far this week has been awesome because of no school on Monday because of MLK Jr Day as well as the snow we got this weekend. All of this time off has given me time to think about what I want to do for this semester. I am still waiting to hear back from the Botanical Gardens about volunteering but hoping that I can start volunteering there sometime within the next month. I think I will really enjoy working with plants and hoping this opportunity will help determine it working with plants would be a good career choice. Meanwhile, at Spark we have been doing a lot of different lab work. We learned how to to a dilution and a serial dilution. Both of them seemed very simple and practical in the lab. We practiced with a ¨stock¨ and then diluting it with water to make a new solution that has a different concentration. Understanding dilutions is very important for working in a lab because it is cheaper and efficient to use diluted solutions. I´m looking forward to doing the blood typing lab...

I have been back at Spark! for the last two weeks and we have already been super busy. We have started a lot more lab work and thinking about our projects for this semester. The first big lab we did was making our own liquid densities and trying to layer them in a falken tube. By dissolving different amounts of sugar you could layer the liquids with the most dense on bottom and least dense on top. As simple as this lab seems it actually took a lot of trial and error to layer the liquids. After several failures where all the layers would mix together I finally was able to make four distinct layers. Besides working in the lab we have also been thinking about our semester project. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a long time. I thought about shadowing but I wanted to try something completely new. So, I'm hoping that I can volunteer at the Botanical Gardens and learn more about plants.

This past week I have learned so many new things about career paths I can take in science. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what I want to do anymore. For a while I was super passionate about people and helping others so the medical field really interested me. Then I began to think maybe research could be a cool job and researched more on neuroscience research. However, as I thought more and more about my future I didn't really want to spend my whole life in the lab. As fun as it seems now the repetition and continual failures before an outcome does not seem the best fit for me. At this point I was really lost. However, as Ms. Jacques continued to talk about career paths in science I became interested in nursing. I always said I never wanted to be a nurse because I seen nurses working in hospitals and knew that was not a job for me. However, as I did some research nurses can work in almost any field of healthcare which was really cool because then they are not stuck in area of ...

Since, September we have been working on an Introductory Class to Python on Coursera so one day if we have basic coding foundations we can use in the future. Coding is pretty big today considering almost everything we do is surrounded by technology. All the information on our phones, computers, tablets, and more have lots of coding that help them function properly. While taking this course I have a grown a huge respect for those who work in computer science because it is quite hard! I never realized how complicated coding can get to make simple outputs. Python is widely used in the scientific and number calculations because it can be integrated easily and collaborate with lots of data. More and more people in biology and chemistry friends are using Python for their research. Like all coding languages, Python is easy to pick up but gets complicated very quickly. Even though, this Python class is challenging in the future I think it can do me some good. I have learned how to perform calc...

Last class Dr. DeAngelo came and gave a presentation about graduate school and the steps it takes to have a career in chemistry. She was probably one of the best presenters I have heard from because she was easy to follow and super passionate about her studies. She made her talk relatable and was hopeful in her message. One of my favorite parts to her presentation was talking about school life at USC as a graduate student. I had an early idea of what graduate school may look like but it did not compare to Dr. DeAngelo's experience. She explained how you choose a team of professors to work with and help you throughout your graduate program. You work in their labs with their research and pick a topic of your interest to focus on and take the qualifying exam on. The qualifying exam is an oral exam in front of your team of professors and they judge your knowledge to answer and explain your topic in depth and with clear understanding. It also interesting to hear how graduate programs ru...