For my practicum, I volunteered in a biochemistry lab on campus. I was in the Poulin lab where I assisted in research on Dispersin B, a protein that breaks down a major sugar found in a lot of bacterial biofilms, with a graduate student Alex Peterson. I started in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and I continue to work there. To get this position, I first asked my advisor if there were any people in the biochemistry department I should reach out about joining their lab, and I made a list of PIs that did research that was interesting to me in the department. Then, I emailed about seven professors total over the course of about two months, and eventually, I reached out to one that was willing to have me come in over the summer, and we worked out I would be working with one of the graduate students on finishing up the research for her thesis. For future SGC scholars who are looking to do research on campus, I would recommend a similar route that I took of emailing people you are interested in doing research with, explaining the practicum, why you are interested in their research, and any experience you might have. I didn't have any research experience, so if you don't have anything to add for that last part, don't worry! Some professors replied that they didn't have any available positions, but some would also forward my email to other professors which was very helpful. I wouldn't worry too much when you get a reply that is a no because it's usually not personal, and there are lots of PIs at UMD who have space for new undergrads.
At my practicum site, I did a lot of what I think are typical biochemistry research activities like PCR, DNA and protein gels, Western blots, protein purification, dealing with cell cultures, and running actual experiments. Something I didn't realize before I started my practicum was how much work is involved in just the setup of a scientific experiment. For example, the experiment I chose to highlight for my practicum, biofilm assays, require we have purified enzyme which means we perform PCR on a plasmid that codes the enzyme, transform some competent cells, incubate those cells on selective plates which you make, make fresh liquid media, take a small amount of that media to grow a culture overnight, inoculate the rest of the media with the overnight culture, wait for the cells to grow, induce them with a specific amount of a sugar and at a specific temperature, pellet the cells, lyse the cells, run the lysate through a column to get your purified enzyme, run a gel on your enzyme and lysate to make sure everything is looking good, concentrate the enzyme, and switch the buffer the enzyme is in to a storage buffer. That's a lot of stuff just for one component of the experiment, but we would use the same batch of enzyme for a bunch of experiments until we ran out. For about four days out of the week, I was usually doing a lot of the setup for an experiment while on Fridays, we would get to do the experiment which made me really appreciate a lot of the background work that has to be done before you can even really get started.
As part of my site, I got to go to our lab group's weekly meeting, a monthly joint-organic labs meeting, and just meetings with my grad student and PI where I learned a lot about bacterial biofilms, current research other labs were doing with our enzyme, and research on other topics that were going on in the department. This experience opened my eyes to how biochemistry research is done at a big academic research institution like UMD. I'm definitely more confident in saying I would like to do research for a career, and I also learned that although I really like biochemistry, I'm more interested in pursuing a career in microbiology/ immunology. Looking forward, the current plan is to try to get a summer research position in microbiology next year, and after I've graduated, try to a post-bac at somewhere like the NIH to explore more about what I am interested in.