Payday! (aka the halfway mark)

Just got half of my stipend today--and this marks the halfway point of the program. When we were all introducing ourselves on the first day, a lot of people, especially the older students, noted that this summer is helping them decide if research is a suitable career path for them.

Coming in, I was thinking about an MD/PhD program after college, so that I could combine clinical work with research. I did an internship at a drug company before freshman year of college, and while I was there, the physician-scientists I worked with felt that having both degrees was really beneficial: a medical degree helps with working with patients, while a doctoral program hones the critical thinking skills crucial for research.

But during these five weeks, I've already felt myself moving away from doing research as a major part of my career, and possibly toward public health. It's not that I'm not enjoying myself; I really do like the work that I'm doing. Also, since I'm in a psych lab, I see subjects regularly (I ran my first one last week, and will have two tomorrow), so it's not like I'm stuck in at a bench pipetting chemicals all day with minimal human contact.

This may just be my naivete and lack of experience, but as I was discussing with one of my roommates, I feel like my skills are better suited for applying scientific information and regularly working with patients and their families as a physician, rather than actually going in and doing the research itself. And I don't doubt that research helps people, but from all of my experiences so far, I find that having direct contact with the people I help is more gratifying. However, getting experience with designing and running studies is definitely worthwhile for any doctor, to help with understanding the vast amounts of literature out there. And I don't view this summer as a make-or-break experience, because what I'm doing now is just one out of many types of research.

On a related note, last week, during our weekly "all BRAIN" meeting, we had a video conference with Dr. Thomas Carew. He's the former president of the Society for Neuroscience, and he worked with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel on aplysia, a large sea slug. Their work contributed a huge amount to what we now know about memory and learning. He was wonderfully down-to-earth and very funny, and we had the opportunity to ask him questions, both about his papers we read during orientation and becoming a scientist. I read off a question my roommate wrote, asking him what the most important quality in an aspiring scientist is. His answer: unbridled curiosity, which fuels the passion and drive to go into the lab whenever necessary, even on Friday nights and weekends, until the question is solved. "You've got to really want it," in his words.

Off to go enjoy some of the dinner I helped prepare--we've fallen into a trend of having one person cook each Wednesday, and everyone who wants to come chips in to help cover the cost. So far we've had spaghetti and Japanese curry; tonight it's jerk chicken :)