I promise I didn’t waste 6 months of college…
The “big thing” for pre-med students now is research. CRISPR this, cell culture that, lab, lab, lab, and more lab. Everyone’s obsessed with getting their hands dirty and seeing their name in journals.
I’m no different, but at the same time, it’s all different.
My name is Chetan Yenigalla. I’m a 2nd-year pre-med studying Neuroscience at Rice University, and I spent over 120 hours conducting research my freshman spring.
Then on an unsuspecting Wednesday afternoon, much like a high school relationship, I was ghosted, except this time there was an HR rep.
The lab I worked in was relatively small: the PI, one postdoc, myself, and one other undergraduate. The postdoc single-handedly managed several projects ranging from structural biology to cellular signalling to anesthetic drug development. You can imagine that, without him, the lab would lose a core driver of its progress and potential.
Well, that’s exactly what happened! The postdoc received an offer he couldn’t refuse from another prestigious institution, and I received an offer just as exciting to return to the job market.
As you can imagine, this news derailed my trajectory as a pre-med student and budding researcher. Months of mastering the lab’s existing results and literature, gaps in knowledge, and key techniques required to progress in our project were all halted without any tangible results to show the work I and the other members dedicated to this lab. It’s easy to drown in the thought that I had wasted six months of my life.
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But letting myself swim in those thoughts would just let that number grow. Instead, I swam through my Netflix suggestions.
I came across the 2023 Bollywood movie 12th Fail, exploring the true story of an impoverished high school dropout’s ups and downs as he strives to join the Indian Police Service. The protagonist repeatedly fails his academy examination, but each time he does not dwell on his failure. Instead, he lives by one word: “Restart.”
So, I did the same. I used the new skills I acquired in this lab to enhance my portfolio and restart my efforts towards novel biomedical research. This semester, I’m studying Glioblastoma and its relationship to chromosomal instability, along with how environmental and genetic factors lead to drug resistance in Glioblastoma treatment. I’m having a great time familiarizing myself with the new lab, and I look forward to all the experiments I’ll conduct.
Still, this “restart” doesn’t change that the results I strived for in my semester in the previous lab will never come to fruition.
And that brings us here. As you can hopefully tell from reading this, I love to share my knowledge through any Medium (get it?), whether that be academic writing or public speaking. I don’t have a shred of doubt that the work I’m doing in my new lab will send me down the rabbit hole of publishing my work and presenting my discoveries to other researchers and scholars, but my timeline towards that goal has essentially just started: new project, new experiments, new goals.
That’s why I’m writing this. Sharing my curiosities and findings doesn’t have to be through some extravagant journal publication or international conference. It can be as simple as a weekly blog post, giving me an outlet to talk about my work in a more laid-back format, while also documenting the wonderful work I hope to do going forward, striving for those publications and grandiose assemblies.
Well, that’s all I have for now. I plan to write a new update on my research each week, giving you insight into everything I’m learning and discovering. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see ya soon!
