Paulina Bargallo, SEAS ’25, Mexico City, Mexico
As someone who has asked many questions since very early in life, research has been a path I have been shown to follow. After joining UPENN, I decided to first adapt to the new culture, language, and classes before digging into more academic research. Two years passed and I was feeling ready, excited, and of course nervous. I started looking for different opportunities for the summer, not so sure what to do. After talking with friends and professors, I realized that I did want to get into research and get to know how research works at the university, however, I was not looking for any research -I wanted a hands -on experience in a lab. So I decided to talk to a professor, Dr. Bomyi Lim, who taught me in Mass and Energy balance course during my sophomore fall semester.
With Emilia Leyes Porello as my mentor in the lab, I learned how to do cloning with Drosophila DNA. We started off the summer by differentiating males and females flies under the microscope until we were able to quantitatively image the embryos to see our markers during transcription.
Cloning is not something that can be done on the first attempt, or at least, not yet; it’s even less intuitive for someone who is learning the ropes!. About halfway through or three-quarters of my time in the lab I started to feel I was behind and I was not achieving any of the steps my mentor was giving me. Many of my experiments were failing, and I ran into many roadblocks during the unexpected sections of my research. The worst part was that neither my mentor nor I knew what was failing. What could we change? Where was the error? My mentor however, was patient and understood that scientific research is a nonlinear process; while I understood this theoretically, it was harder to conceptualize once I was invested in the project.
I recall helping extract DNA from a liquid culture and I forgot to dissolve the palette before the lysis step in one of them. I felt terrible about this mistake. Nevertheless, having a summer at Penn did not mean I spent all my time within the lab. That weekend my friends and I explored Old city and found a hidden treasure called the “Pursuit & Persistence: 300 Years of Women in Science” exhibition. In this exhibit I saw how Mildred Cohn,who won the National Medal of Science in 1982, wrote in one of her lab reports “Forgot to neutralize bacteria!” This entry made me realize that mistakes are part of scientific learning and progress; these mistakes are part of the beauty of research. Laboratory research would really not be fun or rewarding if the process was easy. We then saw a certification of the Manhattan Project, which reminded me that while we may take pride in the research that we are contributing to, we also must be cognizant of the effect we will have on our broader world. We may think at the moment that our work represents scientific progress, however we must be alert and aware of the ethical situation around our projects.
When I got to Penn, like many of the students here, I was not confident of my major and often thought about switching. However, when I had the opportunity to talk to graduate students in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) that had similar doubts and was able to do research this summer in Biotechnology, I found renewed motivation which reassured me that I am in the right place; this opportunity gave me confidence to continue my journey in the fascinating, remarkable field of CBE.
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
