My practicum site was a virtual internship at the National Institute of Health. The internship program is Virtual Student Summer Opportunities to Advance Research (V-SOAR). I specifically worked in Gisela's Storz Lab: Section on Environmental Gene Regulation. I knew NIH had summer internships so I would periodically check their website (https://www.training.nih.gov/research-training/pb/sip/). My mom was planning on going to Sri Lanka that summer, and I had to take care of my brother who has disabilities. I knew that it wouldn't be possible to do an in-person internship. Luckily, NIH had a virtual internship opportunity. I applied to multiple internships, and this was one of the ones I got. I decided to go with V-SOAR because it was the only virtual one.
My advice to future SGC scholars is to create a list of organizations you would be interested in doing an internship. I was interested in the NIH, FDA, FBI, Johns Hopkins, and Children's National Hospital. I recommend making this list in September or October because applications usually open in November. After making a list of organizations, check if they have summer internship opportunities and the requirements for those opportunities. Some internships require students to be a junior or senior. This helps to shorten the list. Also, make sure you have two teachers who would be interested in writing a letter of recommendation. All these applications ask for a reference or letter of recommendation. I also recommend incorporating your values when writing the essays. For example, I value helping others. When I write my essays I show how this opportunity not only brings me closer to my career goals but brings me closer to helping others using my scientific skills.
The focus of my internship was to find novel small RNAs (sRNAs) in the bacteria that cause Syphilis. I learned a lot about bacteria and gene regulation. My task was to look through the UCSC Genome Browser for the Syphilis genome and annotated genes for sRNAs. I had three presentations throughout the internship: What is Treponema pallidum?, T. pallidum ropE gene, and Novel sRNAs in Treponema pallidum. Another part of the program was learning the statistical programming language R. I practiced analyzing metabolomic data using R.
I also spoke with people in different professions and asked them for advice, the pros and cons of their jobs, and their motivation behind being in that profession. Speaking with people in different professions (doctors, researchers, industry workers, etc.) gave me insight into what I would like to do in the future. This internship confirmed that I wanted to become a researcher. I'm leaning towards cancer research, but it's subject to change. The way researchers talked about their jobs made me excited to explore becoming a researcher. They get to do a multitude of things: stay up to date on the latest science, ask questions and build knowledge through experiments, present, explore new technologies, and work with people across the world. The different aspects of being a researcher sound so fun because you're not always doing one thing. And through this knowledge, you get to help people which is important to me. Knowing this, I will go to graduate school.
One aspect of the internship was a discussion about science and society. There must be people to make science digestible for the public. Without presenting knowledge in a way that makes sense to everyone, there is a lot of spread of misinformation. Many news sources take one scientific paper and spread misinformation about eating a specific type of food. I think I gained an appreciation for people who understandably spread science because not everyone knows what genes or small RNA are.