Coming to USC Viterbi, one of the things that I was most excited about was getting involved in research. While undergraduate students are not required to do research, Viterbi has so many research opportunities that many students do end up doing research during their time at USC!
Starting college this past fall, I knew that I wanted to do research but I was worried that finding research opportunities would be difficult. The idea of cold-emailing professors seemed super daunting, and I had no previous lab experience. But despite these fears, in October I decided to give it a try and emailed Dr Shen asking about becoming an undergraduate research assistant. To my surprise, he responded within a few days and soon I was meeting with him, talking to the PhD students, and starting laboratory training! While cold-emailing had seemed super intimidating, it turned out to not be scary at all, and it worked out very well! And that is one of the reasons that I truly love Viterbi, there are so many opportunities and everyone is genuinely happy to help you get involved.
I am an undergraduate research assistant in the Laboratory for Integrative Systems Bioengineering, also known as Shen Lab since our professional investigator is the amazing Dr Keyue Shen. I specifically help one of the PhD students in Dr Shen’s lab, whose project is “Regulation of mitochondrial membrane potential by YAP in cancer cells.” I have loved helping Bella with her project, and I have been trying to learn as much as possible about the background information on membrane potential, mitochondrial proteins, and more so that every day I understand the project a little bit better. As Bella’s sole undergrad at the moment, I get to do a wide variety of tasks, from collagen coating and stamping slides for tumor models, pipetting solutions to run a BCA for protein content analysis, and carrying out the long procedure to separate and image proteins using a Western Blot. Working in a wet lab has a pretty steep learning curve, but in the short time that I have been working in Shen Lab I have been quickly learning more procedures and picking up new skills. As corny as it sounds, working in lab feels exactly like how I imagined “real science” to look like as a kid!
Outside of lab tasks, as an undergraduate research assistant in Shen Lab I also get to attend weekly lab meetings! Our lab is pretty small with only a few undergrads, PhD students, and one post-doc, so Dr Shen always brings us snacks for these meetings. Each week one PhD student presents their research, and all of the other lab members ask questions and discuss new things that could be done to improve the project or troubleshoot problems. The first lab meeting I ever attended featured more science jargon being thrown around than I would have thought possible, but as the months have gone by I have slowly started to understand these meetings. And that brings me to a second thing that I love about lab, it is an amazing way to learn by osmosis!
I have loved the opportunity to do research in my first year here, and I would recommend getting involved in research to anyone who is even a little bit interested! It can seem scary at first to email a professor and dive into a project that you can barely understand, but it is an amazing way to learn, dig your hands into your major, and “do real science.” Thanks for reading, and Fight On!
