Shristi Mapchan, COL ’25, Lilburn, GA
This summer, I had the privilege of continuing my work in transplant nephrology research at The Reese Lab at Penn Medicine. I have been fortunate enough to be a part of this team for over a year and a half now, and this summer only reinforced my gratitude for the work environment Dr. Reese and his team have created. I had worked on a variety of projects during my time at the lab, with much of it focusing on data collection for clinical research. Because of this, I wanted to expand my skill set this summer and focus on a different step of research: data analysis.
With Dr. Reese, we formulated a plan for me to learn how to code in STATA and do some data analysis of my own. I had minimal experience in statistics and coding, so I knew this would be a big task for me to take on. However, with the guidance of the lab team, I was able to succeed in my summer goals.
I spent the first few weeks watching various youtube videos and tutorials on the basics of STATA. Alongside this, I met with two visiting undergraduate students at the lab on a weekly basis to teach each other new commands and help troubleshoot issues together. Dr. Vishnu, a nephrologist at the lab, would also host sessions where he taught us useful applications of STATA so that we could apply it to data as we progressed.
As I gained confidence and experience in working with data and creating visuals and tables in STATA, I moved onto examining a specific dataset for the remainder of the summer. I was interested in living donor kidney transplantation and disparities across racial and ethnic categories within living donors. I did an extensive literature review on living donor transplantation, the reasons for change in the volume, the barriers in getting a living donor, the barriers in being a living donor, relationships between donors and recipients, and then used UNOS data and STATA to characterize these trends over the last 20 years. I spent a lot of time combing through the data to understand what everything means and worked through the code to change and adapt it as I looked at different variables. To end off the summer, I presented to my lab the findings of this work. It was a very gratifying experience to see the results of my effort for the last few months.
This past summer has taught me new skills in not just STATA but also my ability to take on a new challenge and work through it with the help of my peers and mentors. I can’t wait to continue my time at The Reese Lab and grow in my confidence and ability as a researcher.
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
