Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Engineering in Medicine, Boston, MA
I worked as a research intern through the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine program. I worked most closely with Rohan Thakur, a Ph.D. student through the MIT Health, Science and Technology program and learned about his previous and current projects in droplet-based microfluidics. Most of my time was spent working with Rohan to develop more efficient methods for sorting extracellular vesicles (EVs) and loading them with therapeutic cargo. EVs are small (micrometer to nanometer-scale) lipid bilayer-enclosed structures containing RNA, DNA, and protein that are believed to play a significant role in intercellular communication and cancer development and metastasis. Sorting EVs by size would allow researchers to develop a greater understanding of how EV size correlates with other characteristics, such as function and biogenesis mechanism. Additionally, there is much excitement about using EVs for cancer drug delivery—isolating EVs found in patient blood, loading them with therapeutics, and reinjecting the EVs so they deliver this cargo to tumor sites.
A typical day at my internship involved coming into the lab and reading papers relevant to my research or that were going to be discussed at Friday lab meeting or my internship meeting. A half hour to hour later, I would then meet with Rohan to discuss the plan for the day in terms of experiments and the larger picture of where we would be heading for the week. The rest of the day would be spent in carrying out the experiments, reading papers, and/or fabricating PDMS devices that Rohan was planning to use on his own experiments. I also had the opportunity to get connected with several MD-Ph.D. degree holders to ask them about what led them to take their particular career path and to shadow a Ph.D. student working at a larger lab in Harvard Yard.
I am very grateful for being placed in this particular lab at Mass General. Rohan went above and beyond to make sure that I was doing relevant work, enjoying the research and actually understanding each experiment that I was carrying out, and getting the most out of my experience in terms of making connections and developing a better understanding of what a research career looks like. Additionally, my PI was almost always available to meet up to discuss my progress and continually checked up on me to make sure that I was comfortable and learning a lot. I also couldn’t have asked to have been accepted into a more helpful internship program. Dr. Basuk Uygen, the PI mainly in charge of the program, organized journal club discussions for us every Friday, as well as seminars on reading journal articles and keeping an organized lab notebook. She gave each student the opportunity to present at a journal club meeting, as well as to present their work at the end of the internship to a group of PIs, post-docs, and Ph.D. students. The program was well-organized and provided each student with a wide range of valuable experiences that not only involved independent research but also multiple opportunities to present to groups of experienced researchers.
Through my experience at Mass General, I not only developed academic skills that I believe will be very helpful for my work at Williams but also developed, on a personal level, a greater sense of responsibility for my time. I led several presentations of various scales during my internship, including more informal presentations to my PI to share my progress, two journal club meetings—one to other interns and the other to my lab, as well as a final presentation to PIs, post-docs, Ph.D. students and other interns. Through these presentations, I practiced simplifying my ideas so that I could more efficiently and clearly share my thoughts and be more captivating in explaining ideas that were exciting to me but could come across as irrelevant to my audiences. I believe these skills will be helpful in the many presentations that I will have to conduct in my Williams career, including presentations in the classroom as well as in my research lab and hopefully throughout my thesis work. The MGH research experience also gave me practice in extending my academic knowledge to real-world applications. In thinking of the next steps in my research project, I constantly had to question how concepts that I had learned in my classes or had read in a research paper could be relevant to my project and help me to more efficiently attain my next goals.
Additionally, I am grateful for the great degree of independence that was granted to me and thus the sense of responsibility that I was able to develop and use throughout my work at MGH. I was essentially allowed to define my own work hours and was given the freedom to carry my project in whatever direction I wanted to. At first, the amount of freedom I was given was intimidating to me and I was honestly nervous about if I would be able to effectively use my time to be as helpful to the lab as possible. However, I was determined to be the best intern I could possibly be and was grateful for the opportunity to develop responsibility in my work ethic with all the freedom I had.
In terms of my future career choices, research at MGH has led me to more seriously consider pursuing a Ph.D. after Williams. I really enjoyed the process of coming into lab every day and pursuing slowly and steadily the next goal I had set for myself. Shadowing a Ph.D. student in another lab also allowed me to see the experience in another setting and continue to develop my understanding of what graduate school would look like.
Thank you so much to the Estate of James Kellogg for their generous support and to the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for providing this opportunity. I am beyond grateful for this internship that ultimately allowed me to enjoy my work and learn to the fullest.
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