Asmus Nielsen, COL ’27, Aalborg, Denmark
It’s amazing how much you can learn from something you can’t even see with the naked eye. I’m incredibly grateful to the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant for allowing me to dive into research in the laboratory of Professor Arjun Raj, Departments of Genetics and Bioengineering this summer. It has been a spectacular learning experience.
The Raj Lab focuses on developing new methods based on imaging and sequencing and using these to build a quantitative understanding of cellular function. This was my first time working full-time in a laboratory for an extended period. As a result, I experienced many firsts: working in tissue-culture hoods, attending lab meetings regularly, and even participating in a laboratory volleyball game. I also had the opportunity to try many techniques I had only read about: restriction enzymes, transformations, NanoDrop, PCR, lentiviral delivery, gel electrophoresis, colony picking, and flow cytometry, to name a few. This hands-on training deepened my understanding of the theories I had learned. In that regard, I especially appreciated my mentor, Pav Ravindran, MD/PhD student, who took the time to both show me the procedures and discuss the theory behind them.
While these technical skills were crucial, what impacted me most was the personal and professional growth that came with these experiences. The project I worked on in the lab sought to develop a novel method to better understand T-cell trajectories in solid tumors. To do this, with Pav’s guidance, I got to set up my own experiment, using many of the abovementioned techniques. For me, this was definitely the most exciting part of the experience: coming in Monday morning to see if the work you had done a few days earlier had succeeded or not… No matter the outcome, I learned and observed from the PhDs/PostDocs in the lab that with a combination of meticulous, critical, detail-oriented thinking and persistence, you can come far and will soon enough get results. I enjoyed the iterative process of: Think. Try. Observe. REPEAT.
With each successful experiment, I realized the journey was far from over. The next step—analyzing and interpreting the data—proved to be an entirely different challenge. I had never used any programming language, but I needed Python to analyze my data. Surprisingly to me, I quickly grasped the basics and applied them to develop data analysis pipelines. I gained confidence from this experience in my ability to quickly adapt and learn new skills, both within and outside the classroom.
Related to the data analysis and presenting results, I gained a new appreciation for the meticulous effort that goes into presenting scientific results. This realization hit home during lab meetings, where an impressive amount of time and energy were spent thinking about how to best present results. This applied not only to plots/figures but also to language: “What is a good word to describe [this…]?” was a question often asked. I tried to adopt this very high standard and made many iterations for some of my data before selecting the one that best communicated the results. All in all, my appreciation for scientific articles and the work put into every dimension of them has absolutely increased.
On the theme of scientific literature, I’ve noticed a significant improvement this summer in my ability to read and understand research papers. The lab journal club and casual yet insightful coffee chats in the break room with Pav have greatly enhanced my fluency in this area. The journal articles read, the methods learned, experiments conducted, data analyzed, and plots created – really, all the things I learned during my summer at the Raj Lab came together at the end: I presented my accomplishments during a lab lunch to Professor Raj and the rest of the lab members. We discussed the work and the next steps. As someone new to research, getting helpful and thoughtful feedback from a room with decades of combined experience was exciting.
Again, I want to use this opportunity to thank Professor Arjun Raj for allowing me in the lab, Pav Ravindran for helping and guiding me, the rest of the lab for welcoming me, and, lastly, Penn Career Services for giving me the economic support to make this all happen. Finally, as I reflect on my time in the lab, it’s clear that these experiences and lessons learned will serve as a solid foundation for my continued journey in science. My curiosity and drive to explore the unknown and all the things you can’t see with the naked eye has only deepened.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 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
