Entomology Research
I interned at the University fo Kentucky entemology lab senior year of high school. I was able to pick up a research project that a former PhD student had started as my own project. Under the mentorship of a professor and a different PhD student I studied the efficacy of utilizing a biotechnology for intect population control, specifically for fruit flies native to Lexington, KY. We injected a control, lab strand, and native specied of fruit flies with a lethal transgene that would prevent the females from barings offspring. This transgene also introduced a florescent gene into the flies' system to destinguish between those that were carriers and those that were not.
In this lab I learned PCR, gene extraction, electropheresis, Microsoft Excel, and scientific writing. I also learned how to be confident in my abilities and if I lacked the ability, I grew confidence in asking questions and teaching myself what I needed to know. More often than not I was the only one in the lab as my high school internship block started at 8 am, which left me the daunting task of figuring things out. Several times I had to snoop around the lab to find a chemical or tool I needed, knowing this was something I was allowed to do. In this lack of day to day guidance I grew very familiar with the lab enviroment and confident in my skills to just figure things out. One time I was in the lab alone and was sorting fruit flies under a microscope between male and female. I came across a fruit fly that was split exactly down the middle, half male, half female. This I could tell based on the pattern of the back, half solid half stripped. I thought this was so cool but there was no one to ask about it or show my abviously nobel prize worthy discovery to. I looked it up and learned that it was something called a gynandromorphh, half female half male and is apparently not a medical marvel. I emailed my mentor a picture and asked if I should keep it. By the time I had ot leave for the day my mentor had not emailed me back and I was so curious about it and wanted to maybe run more experiments on it so I decided to freeze it and show it to him later that week. He said it was interesting that it was the native fruit fly species rather than the lab grown species because they were more simple organisms. I never ended up conducting any other experiments on this fly as my other research consumed all of my time at the lab.
I graduated high school and had to leave the lab before conclusive results were made but I submitted my paper and preliminary findings to the 2022 AP Research exam and recieved a perfect score, placing in the top 1% of students world wide. I decided to join this lab for my senior internship because I wanted research experience and to be honest I thought working with insects would be pretty cool. At the time I thought I wanted to be either a cosmologist or neuro-scientists. I was not qualified to work in a lab in either of those fields as a high school student. I emailed a handfull of labs at U.K. to ask if I could join their lab for the year and this was the only one that responded. It was a great oportunity and an excelent experience. I got so much out of this internship and gre so much but I came out of it knowing I did not want to go in to biology. Not necessarilty because I hated the work I was doing, but because I found myself being more intersted in watching math you tube videos than conducting this entemology research. I would not trade this experience for the world though.
