Health Science Reviews

by Michael Goldschagg

My honours year has been a rollercoaster in many ways, and what I expected in no way. It has presented challenges, triumphs, opportunities, and difficulties that I haven’t encountered before.

Having moved away from home this year I always knew I would be faced with hardships alongside enjoyment. The year began as a stressful mess with protests blocking campus, accommodation issues, funding question marks, and sweltering heat I thought I escaped from. Once into the specific techniques section of our course I feel that I began to find my rhythm. We were doing so much interesting work in the lab and learning while not being pressured to remember every single thing because the work wasn’t examinable. There’s something about learning with no expectations that make things stick better in your brain than any studying for an exam could. Spending time with just my two classmates, especially late into the day for notorious Western Blot experiments, made this experience better because we could really relate to each other despite coming from markedly different backgrounds. Then to cap specific techniques off, the first of many nerve-wracking presentations.

These presentations became an almost weekly occurrence throughout the semester, and I really came to enjoy them. I maintain that it is one of the best ways to examine us because it is such a functional skill we will use in our future careers but have had little exposure to previously. The four modules in the semester were all interesting and challenging, particularly due to the rapid rate of reading scientific articles required to keep up with class discussions. As always a tough exam season came by which was testing in self-discipline, knowing what to study, and not falling into the trap of “oh it only counts 4% for the year” (I’m sorry module 4, you may have been a victim of that). In the end I came out on top and felt ready to tackle my thesis. Boy was I wrong.

There is still so much I am learning about conducting the science – how to keep a tight but realistic schedule, where is everything in the lab, am I doing enough, dealing with broken microscopes, never mind the various admin necessities of master’s and funding applications, equipment bookings, scheduling, planning around due dates for assignments and doing them. This all is the unexpected difficulty that I alluded to earlier. It seems that a part of growing up is having to do a lot of mundane-seeming tasks that you didn’t understand adults doing when you were younger. But now more and more I’m thinking that mundane isn’t the right word. It all may seem boring when you’re only looking at what is on hand. In reality, each of us are doing incredible experiments and setting up our futures in the world of research. We need to keep sight of that, to see that with each vortex, centrifugation, incubation we are changing the world.

I have by no means figured all of this out, and I still get that weird feeling of half-drowning half-boredom from not enough to do. Science isn’t fast, science isn’t glamorous, sometimes science doesn’t feel like science at all, but always, there is magic happening right under our eyes.