During my Sophomore year at UW, I took a position as a student research assistant at a Neurology lab on campus. I was excited for the new opportunity, and for most of that year I enjoyed learning about lab procedures and scientific techniques. I noticed that it helped prepare me for coursework in many of my classes including reading/writing research papers and recognizing good scientific processes for carrying out experiments. I formed great relationships with the other members of my team during the two years I worked in this lab, and was consistently given new responsibilities as time went on.
Junior year came along, and I started to realize that I wasn't as excited to go to work anymore. I would soon realize that what I loved most about my job was the people I worked with, and not actually the work itself. I started to feel disillusioned about what I thought working in scientific research would be like. It caused me to reconsider what I thought my biology career path might look like, and led me to the discovery of some very interesting career options that I would have never thought of (like genetic counseling). I am a big believer in the saying that everything happens for a reason, and I think that although my research experience did not turn out to be what I thought, it was even more educational than I could have hoped.
