WEBVTT

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All right.

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So as was said, my name
is Emily Durlacher.

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I am a junior neuroscience
major philosophy minor.

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And I'm going to talk to you
about my time in a neurobio lab

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at Boston University.

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And also, I'd like
you to excuse the pun,

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I really just
couldn't help myself.

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[CHUCKLING]

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So a little bit about what
I'm going to be talking about.

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First, I'm going to address
how I got to be you, sort

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of my pathway to my internship.

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A little bit about
my process of getting

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accustomed to the
lab environment.

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The climax of this
learning curve,

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which were the two presentations
I had to give in lab meeting.

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And the upshot.

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So as a philosophy minor,
the upshot in philosophy is,

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why does this matter,
and why is it important?

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So my path to my internship
was a little bit different

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than how you'll hear
most people got theirs.

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I applied for and
actually was accepted

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to an abroad program
in Berlin and Munich

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studying lab technique
in Germany for six weeks.

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However, upon further
investigation into the program,

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we found that I
was going to have

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to come up with--
from somewhere--

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a very large amount of money
in a very short amount of time.

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So after many calls
home and some tears,

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we realized that
Germany was not going

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to be a possibility for me.

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So the next step, I went to
the CDC to Jenny Watermill--

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who is not here, but who
I thanked and ran into--

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and I said, what's my next step?

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This is what I was going
to do with my summer.

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Where do I go from here?

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And she said, well, have
you tried cold emailing?

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You live in Greater Boston, it's
the best place in the country

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to find university lab jobs.

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Have you looked up any of these
labs, read some of their work,

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sent the PIs an email
saying, here's what I do,

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and here's my transcript,
and I'd love to work for you.

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And I hadn't.

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So that night, I went
back to my room in Ham

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and I sent three cold emails.

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And I was fortunate
enough to hear back

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from two labs in 24
hours, both of which

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were interested in hiring me.

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One at Brandeis
University and one at BU.

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And during Spring Break,
I went in and interviewed,

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and both labs offered me a
position during the interview.

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So I had to choose between
a further commute but maybe

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subject material I was
more interested in at BU,

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and a closer commute,
but maybe material

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I was less interested in.

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And I ended up going with the
slightly riskier choice of BU.

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So my early days in
the lab definitely

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took some getting used to.

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I was really surprised by
how informally my coworkers

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dressed.

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Not that they looked
sloppy or unprofessional,

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but in a lot of
other internships,

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you would hear
about at LEAP people

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have to dress very
business casual.

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And what I learned is that,
in a lab, it's about safety.

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Are you wearing long pants?

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Are you wearing
close-toed shoes?

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Could you make it through
a chemical spill OK?

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Granted, that's a
whole other scenario

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than when you're on the
T, and it's 95 degrees,

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and you're stuck in long
pants and close-toed shoes.

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But that's another story.

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Something else that surprised
me was just how bureaucratic

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I found research to be.

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I started at BU on
June 1, and as it was,

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it took me three weeks to
be able to enter the animal

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facility and handle mice.

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And I was only
there for 12 weeks,

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so three weeks is a long time.

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And so what I did
in the meantime

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was I classified tapes
of mouse behavior

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that had been in
the lab for years.

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Because the lab is very small.

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There were five people
other than myself.

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So as research was progressing,
these tapes had kind of sat,

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and nobody had analyzed them.

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So this bottom picture is one
of the first things I ever

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did in the lab, which was
over a long period of time,

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I coded and organized behavior
over this interval of time.

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And when I came into
the lab, I saw things

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like this, none of which
I had ever seen before.

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It was my first time
ever in a lab setting.

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The middle signage was-- the
sign was outside of my lab,

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and it was telling you,
this is the safety equipment

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you have to wear,
this is who you

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call if you break something
or spill something.

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So I had to get up to snuff
very, very quickly on,

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these were the procedures,
this is the signage,

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this is how things are run.

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On the right is our
two-photon microscope,

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which was probably
the single coolest

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piece of equipment in our lab.

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It actually shot
photons of light

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into the brains of
live subjects so we

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could observe neural
behavior in live subjects.

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And on the left, just as an
image of some of the-- how

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the chemicals were set up--

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and again, at a big
school, I wasn't

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used to just this wide array
of products and applications.

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Something else is
that our lab was

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based in the olfactory
system, so the sense of smell

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especially as related
to mouse behavior.

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The only problem is, I had
never previously studied

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the olfactory system.

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In fact, in my Intro
to Neuroscience class,

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my professor had her book, we
were doing sensory systems,

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and she said, you know,
olfaction is too complicated.

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You don't need to
know it for this exam.

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So I come into the lab,
and naturally, my coworkers

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are throwing around
this vocabulary

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that I've never heard before.

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So it took a lot
of self-learning

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to sort of accustomize
myself to what exactly

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was going on in the lab.

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But about halfway
through my time at BU,

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my supervisor
approached me and said,

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how would you like to take
on an independent project?

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And I was totally shocked.

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I said, a visiting
undergrad who doesn't even

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attend your school, and
you want to give her

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all this responsibility?

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He took a really big risk.

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And I ended up conducting trials
on socially transmitted food

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preferences in mice,
which-- to give you

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a short synopsis-- is basically
the idea that one mouse can

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smell information about the
mouse another mouse has--

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or the food another
mouse has eaten.

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No cannibalism here.

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And can then get information
about the relative health

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of the mouse, and also the
relative safety of the food.

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So the single biggest task that
I took on during my time at BU

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was the presentations I had
to give in our weekly lab

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meetings.

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These meetings were used
for either presentations

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of primary literature,
or presentation of data

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from your own experiments.

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The single scariest
thing I did all summer

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was when my coworker came to
my desk, put this on my desk,

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and said, this was just
published in the Journal

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of Cell Biology this month.

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We want you to present this
in lab meeting next week.

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And I looked at this,
and my jaw dropped.

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I said, I have no
idea what this means.

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I'm starting from scratch.

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Of course, I said
I'm going to do it.

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I'm going to take it on.

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But it took me that entire week,
20, 25 hours' worth of work,

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of just sitting at my desk and
plowing through this paper.

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And it was incredibly
rewarding, but at the time,

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it felt like this work was
just amounting to nothing.

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And then my last lab
meeting that I was there

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for, I presented my own data
on socially transmitted food

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preferences, which one of
the grasses on the far right.

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My data actually ended
up being inconclusive,

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which was a little bit
heartbreaking after spending

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two months researching this.

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But what I realized is
this is an ongoing project.

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At my lab right now,
there's a BU undergrad

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continuing my research.

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So I left something
of a legacy when

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I left BU, which was
really important to me.

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So why does this matter?

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Why is this important?

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Why am I telling you about
this, other than the fact

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that I need to for
class requirement?

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[CHUCKLING]

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Backup plans are
super important.

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If you had asked me in
January, what are you

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going to do with your summer?

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I would have said,
I'm going to Germany.

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It's going to be awesome.

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I'm going to learn all
this cool lab stuff.

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And what I had to do was take a
step back and realize, what is

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it I actually want to be doing?

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And what I wanted to be doing
was learning lab technique

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and get comfortable
in an environment.

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And I found a way to
do that closer to home.

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And I really managed to surprise
myself with how self-motivated

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I was when it came to
learning an entirely

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new set of vocabulary that
I'd never known before.

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But the most important
thing I learned

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is that scientific research
is incredibly problematic.

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It's super bureaucratic.

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People are competitive.

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People don't take you
seriously, especially if you're

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the only female undergrad in
the department and the only one

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that doesn't go to BU.

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But what I learned is
that I love it anyway.

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And that's what I
want to do for a job,

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despite all the flaws that
I found with it that summer.

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So I'd like to think
my PI, Dr. Ian Davison.

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My lab mates, Dr.
[INAUDIBLE],, Carl Budlong,

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Ellen [? Makowski, ?]
and Kelsey Williford.

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This is us at the beach my
last day at the internship.

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We went to the North Shore.

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The entire rest of the
Neurobio Department

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at Boston University.

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But most importantly,
Jenny Watermill at the CDC,

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because without her, I
would not have ended up

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with an internship at all.

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So thank you and
enjoy my co-panelists.

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