#13: “Inspirational Thanksgiving” (Week of November 27th)

It was Thanksgiving week, and while I didn’t do that much, my cousin came over from Ohio and we did a lot of fun stuff. We saw the final cricket match between Australia and India, and we painted our faces with the India flag. I woke up at 2:30 AM, but unfortunately India lost. They played well throughout all matches though, so they still did well. Also, Virat Kohli(The captain of the Indian cricket team), beat Sachin Tendulkar’s high score in the number of centuries made, which is an incredible achievement. Anyway, after the match, me and my family played cricket to improve our moods, and I played pretty well and made a lot out of boundary shots(you have to hit the ball with a bat over a boundary which would be 6 runs/points)., my cousin and my friend also went to the Taylor Swift concert movie. My cousin is a huge fan so it was fun because she was screaming for Taylor Swift. I used to like her music a lot too, and while I don’t listen to her as much as before, it was a really fun experience. Other than that, me and my friend also sang at a party in front of many people as a joke. We sang a Hindi rap song and did it impromptu. It was an incredibly bad but funny performance, and it made me realize that I had stopped being as scared of people as I used to be. On Thanksgiving day, I also met with a few family friends and saw an actual Turkey for the first time(I’m vegetarian though so I couldn’t eat it, which is good cause honestly I’d prefer not to, but it was cool to see what many families here consider a main part of Thanksgiving).Anyway, I'm feeling more hopeful about my research now. Even though I started anew and changed my topic, I feel that I can contribute somehow to ISM. I might not be able to develop an actual project or even a proper research paper by the end of the next semester even, but I will try my best. I interviewed Dr. Ann m Rajnicek and I learned a lot about the research process. I felt that that interview went amazing, even though it was only a written interview, as I learnt a lot and even felt motivated. The interview gave me a clearer understanding of the field and the diverse paths one can take within biomedical science. In Particular, Dr. Rajnicek taught me about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in research, and being realistic with the time goal.  It's fascinating to learn about the potential applications in areas like Parkinson's disease. Even though I didn’t learn much about how cancer is affected by bioelectricity, I hope to do that in my next interviews with Dr. Will Brackenbury and Dr. Mustafa Djamgoz. I’ve also started reaching out to professors in Collin College and colleges nearby to be more realistic and in order to try my experiments in a lab one day for this project. I was thinking that I could make a computational model of the bioelectricity network between cancer cells, in order to know what we need to change in the bioelectricity network to make it normal. I still need to understand what exactly changes in the bioelectricity that changes how the cells work. Is it a change in the gap junctions and their functioning, a change in the chemicals that are being exchanged, or a change in the cells, or how many chemicals are being exchanged? I will be asking questions about this and more in my next few interviews. I found out about a few internships and summer programs over the summer, and now I’ll start applying for them. I want to try to apply for RSI or the MIT Biogen internship, but RSI is SUPER competitive so I most probably won’t get in, but I’ll still try to apply. I was also searching about Research competitions that I can compete in with my ISM project, and I found out about Heman Bekele, who developed a soap that can treat skin cancer. When I read about him, I was so surprised and had so many questions. How did he make the soap? What was his research process? Does the soap change a mutation in the cells? How does it work? How did he test it out? I connected with him on Linkedin, and I will be asking him these questions soon. Honestly, I was inspired by him, and I hope that even though I can;t cure cancer, I can have at least a little impact on the scientific community with my research.