Student Research at Duke

Although I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience doing research this summer, and I hope to continue with it as an undergrad, I don’t see myself going in to research as a career. I don’t think I’m patient enough for the slow pace of it. I now realize how many things have to come together to finally finish a project and get published. While it is cool to always have more questions and have more to research, I think I would rather have a specific project to work on once it is ready to be marketed so there can be closure.

I think I want to work in the biotech industry after undergrad and then maybe go back to school to get an MBA or Masters. I like being a team leader and organizing projects and events. I feel like it will be possible to move up the ladder in industry faster than I would be able to in research. It would be great to get a PhD and cure cancer but I realize that there are so many people that are so much more passionate about biology and medical research than I am so it’s probably not the right career for me. I hope to have an internship in industry some time before I graduate so I can see if a career in that direction is better for me.

I’ve almost finished creating all of the ROIs on the MRIs. We tried to start the analysis last week but the data is x, y, t, z instead of x, y, z, t. We’ll have to write a program to convert it. I also had to get dicominfo for all of the patients so we would know what time each slice was taken. Ben printed out a graph for one of the patients and the curve looked better with evenly spaced points then with the actual time points so we’ll have to figure out why that is. We’re meeting with someone this week to help write the program so hopefully we’ll finally get started with the analysis!

In other news, we had a Howard Hughes bbq on 4th of July which turned out great. Tessa and I went to the baseball game for the fireworks later and that was fun.