If I didn’t already give it away, meeting Mia was pivotal in convincing me that Scripps Research had serious potential to be my future home, so immediately after the program ended, I applied for a position as a SURF/REU intern. After a few tense weeks, I was delighted to read my acceptance email and request Mia as my top-choice research mentor. 

          As is customary, I reached out to Mia before the internship began and informed her that anything was game when it came to placing me on a project. I was eager to learn and was just glad to be there, and, well, she delivered a juggernaut of a learning experience. I was tasked with developing various glycosaminoglycan biosynthesis primers and analyzing their sulfation patterns on resultant heparan sulfate biopolymers. In my eyes, this was a true tip-to-tail chemical biology study, heavily reliant on chemical synthesis, cell culture techniques, analytical chemistry, and data analysis – things I had next to no practical experience with beyond a fundamental understanding of assorted SN2 and protection reactions. Like, I didn’t even know that chemical reactions needed to be purified. I had a suspicion Mia knew this, though, and I was assured my mentors Tim and Tesia would be more than capable of integrating me into their workflow and teaching me how to advance the project independently. 

           I spent my first six weeks on the project creating the small compounds, doing my best to overcome the maddeningly steep learning curve so famously native to organic chemistry. I was the antithesis of a natural, and it scared the hell out of me. Some point shortly after my fourth week in the lab, I decided that from then on, instead of wholly relying from help from my mentors, I would use my own observational capacity and problem-solving potential to avoid mistakes. This mindset shift completely revolutionized my development, as I entered a period of exponential growth. I began going into the lab earlier and leaving later so that I could push myself to be the master of my own work and take command of not only my personal development, but the entirety of the project. By all means, my anime protagonist-like behavior may or may not have been inspired by a recently-developed late-night ritual of intensely binge-watching Naruto Shippuden, Attack on Titan, and My Hero Academia. 

         In a flash, I finished synthesizing compounds and incubated them in cell culture, allowing me to transition to working with Tim on analytics. Working with Tim was fantastic, as he gave me space to troubleshoot and develop my analytical reasoning. After an extremely rigorous three and a half weeks of nearly round-the-clock work, we obtained a decent wealth of preliminary data, and it actually looked… pretty good. I was proud of myself, as after ten weeks of using well over a dozen recently-learned skills to produce scientifically valuable data, I had completed one of the most difficult challenges of my life. To complete my picturesque summer, I competed against other interns in the program in a poster presentation competition and ended up winning an all-expenses paid trip to a conference of my choosing. In thanking everybody before jetting off to relieve myself of burnout, I made sure to include a “see you soon” in my final regard because I sincerely hope this is not my final point of interaction with these fantastic people. 

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