I have made many meaningful contributions to my workplace thus far. I’ve helped one of my coworkers out by acting as a subject in one of his experiments. I’ve also worked on my project, which isn’t directly beneficial to my mentor, but is beneficial to my co-intern Emelia’s and my introduction to scientific research. Also, the specific question I’m trying to answer has already been researched, but if I went just a little farther with it, I could break into new territory, and make entirely new discoveries. This is a really exciting feeling - I could make wholly new discoveries about how the world works, and help people to understand the brain better, all before I’m out of high school.
I’ve measured the success of the work I’ve done at my workplace by setting daily goals (and weekly goals, and goals for the whole internship), and evaluating how much I’ve completed at the end of each day (or week, or month). This has been really effective for me, because knowing what specifically needs to get done leads to a more productive day - I know what I need to get done by the end of the day, which is a much easier thing to tackle than, say, just knowing what needs to get done by the end of the internship.
My internship has inspired me to ask many questions about the world. For instance, I have grown even more curious about the workings of the brain since I’ve started here. Especially vision and language processing. I’ve become motivated to learn more about neuroscience by reading books, and even consider it as a possible career path.
If I do select this as a career path, I now know what some of the educational milestones I will have to overcome are. For instance, I know I will have to at least complete graduate school, and most likely be a postdoctoral researcher as well. In the mentor interview I completed earlier this month, I learned that in this field, it’s very useful to have a background in physics, something I didn’t expect at all. Two people told me separately that physics is a very useful thing to major in for undergraduate work. I don’t yet know exactly what field I’m going to go into, but I will definitely keep that in mind as I go forward.