Hannah Kim, COL ’25, Glastonbury, CT
The first several days of working in the Chung Lab involved making implants. Even just getting used to the microscope was an ordeal, because I was not used to seeing my hands move in such a zoomed in scale. Learning how to properly use solder to attach wires to the implants was another hurdle, and I melted through quite a bit of screws in my early trials. However, after these very frustrating and humbling days, I slowly got better. By the end of the first month, I was easily soldering on wire and screws without a single mishap.
When I was taken down to the mice room and was able to see the mice with the implants I had made, running around with wires sprouting from their heads, the scale of research as a concept struck me. How well I make implants affects the quality of the EEG and EMG data that is collected through them, which affects the ease at which that data can be analyzed, which can affect the outcome of an experiment. Yes, it was easy to lose myself in the motions of soldering over and over again, but each time I soldered, the quality, whether good or bad, could have rippling effects on data collected even weeks in the future.
This became even more apparent when I started to do perfusions for the first time. Perfusions in this lab involve injecting the mouse with phosphate buffered saline (PBS) and Paraformaldehyde (PFA), cutting off its head, and then carefully removing its brain. The first time I watched my mentor go through all these (quite grisly) steps, I was shocked, but after my initial tries, I also started to appreciate the detail oriented process the same way I had with making implants. The rippling effect became apparent to me during a week when I spent hours upon hours counting cells on images of brain slices. The brains I had removed from these mice with the implants I had made, and the images I had taken using the microscope room, were now on my laptop as I squinted at my screen to see if a glowing dot counted as a cell.
What I realized is that there is a large difference between reading about how detail oriented and process focused research can be and actually being a part of that detail oriented process. The smallest decisions, like redoing the solder for a screw, quite literally follows the research through all the way even months later. The precision required in research, specifically the type of neuroscience research done in the Chung Lab, surprised me, and I grew to appreciate the importance of every single movement and decision made— not just because of the technical skills I developed with making implants and doing mouse perfusions, but applying that sort of mindset in outside contexts and how I approach my academic decisions in the future.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
