Gratitude

by Luke B., 12th Grade Research 2 Student

For me, senior year is easily summed up in one word — involved. Very, very involved. Other less savory words cross my mind occasionally, too — but I prefer involved because, even though organizing due dates on my calendar frequently feels like playing an impossible game of Tetris, it’s struck me again and again these past two and a half months of school how fortunate I am for the educational opportunities at the roots of all those deadlines. And of those educational opportunities, Research is especially significant.

This is my second year in the Scientific Research track here at Minnetonka, and as a Research II student there are many things about this program that I’m grateful for. For one thing, all of the little hands-on laboratory skills I picked up last year have already given me a head start on college science courses, a fact that I didn’t truly appreciate until the first week of school when I stepped into the lab portion of the University of Minnesota biology course I’m taking as a PSEO student.

Basic procedures that were completely new to my sophomore, biology-major classmates, like pouring media plates or streaking bacteria for isolation, had become routine for me last year, and I initially took it for granted that everyone would at least know how to maintain basic sterile technique (i.e., minimize contamination) — not so! In particular, I remember watching with a mixture of amusement and horror as my lab partner rubbed his thumb all over the interior face of the cap to our previously sterile microcentrifuge tube while pipetting in a solution. (Fortunately this slip up wasn’t a big deal for that protocol.)

The vast majority of those practical lab skills, including that last one about not contacting any of the inside surfaces of a microfuge tube, I learned from my amazing mentor, Freddie Miller, who is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and also certifiably the most patient person on the planet. She’s taught me more about microbiology than I knew there was to know. I’m incredibly thankful to her for her enthusiasm and for the generosity with which she lends her time; I’m also thankful to everyone else at Freeman Lab in St. Paul for welcoming a clueless high schooler into their midsts with open arms.

On top of all that, Freddie, my teacher Mr. Burns, and the whole Research class experience itself have given me something to be thankful for that’s meaningful in a larger way. For all of my life before last year, science was just an abstract idea in my head. Neither of my parents work in STEM professions, so science only existed in the realm of textbooks for me — saying that I wanted to be a biologist has always felt about as concrete as saying that I wanted to be astronaut or an actor. But over the last year, working with bacteria and DNA polymerases in Research has removed that layer of distance and abstraction; science suddenly feels real, which is completely crazy and exciting. So, as involved as my schedule may be, all I can really be is sincerely, overwhelmingly appreciative of this experience.