This is a mandatory blog post for the Wagoner Foreign Study Fellowship. I am supposed to write a letter offering advice to my former self before I left for my trip. I also wrote this two weeks ago.

Dear past Elaine,

The worst and best is yet to come. I know you have been daydreaming about this trip and experience for a very long time, but don’t expect it to be as magical as your study abroad trip last time you were here. That was a program designed especially for university students to learn, and this time around, doing science in Panama will not feel so personalized Unfortunately, you will not be super integrated into the culture of Panama unless you spend a lot of personal energy trying to create that kind of connection. You will engage in some conversations with the locals, but you’ll crave reading a book on the cultural history of Panama. Most days, you’re going to feel as if you’re only valued for the manual labor you are able to contribute. You’ll feel like no one cares about how you feel and only about how you perform. You won’t be able to take days off without feeling uncomfortable since everyone is left to pick up your slack, and you’ll end up with a pit of extreme guilt sitting in your stomach.

You are going to cry a lot because you want everything to be perfect. Everything is going to intimidate you, even though they are very basic skills that other people in your field find extremely straightforward and easy. You’re gonna mess up (very early on, in fact). You will spend time thinking about how incompetent you are in a field you’ve been wanting to do your entire life. You’ll even doubt if you want a career in marine science, or if it was all one big daydream you’ve just managed to keep up your whole life.

You are going to understand so much more what it means to be a scientist- both physically and mentally. Both are important, but you are going to find that the mental strength will be hard to develop. Please, stop taking everything so personally. Your project and data are yours, but some of it is out of your control as to whether or not it will work. You could do everything perfectly and come up with no results. If you fail, it will be okay. But you know that your drive will get you through most of the harder times. Once you stop caring about what other people think about you, even if they are in a position of power, you will be so much happier. There is only so much you can do to change the results of your project up to a certain point, and the same thing happens with peoples’ perceptions of you.

Practice gratitude often, but also stop feeling like you are constantly an inconvenience to people. Recognize that your mentors agreed to help you, and asking questions and doing things slowly are all a part of the process. Do not boss people around, but reasonably expect people to take some of their time to help you. Remember to thank them, and help them later when they need it. The environment that labs create can be harsh and feel unreasonably ruthless, but you just need to be the bigger person, always smile, and remember what a great opportunity this is for you. Treat everyone with not just respect, but kindness. You’re also going to be surprised at how willing your co-workers are to listen to your fears, problems, and ideas. You’ll never call them co-workers because they will all become great friends who have shared a very unique summer with you.

All in all, don’t sweat the small stuff, even when it feels like too much sometimes. Rise to the occasion, you know you can! YOU WILL MEET YOUR GOALS BECAUSE ETHEY ARE REALISTIC BECAUSE YOU CAN DO IT!!

Cheers,

Future Elaine

This is a mandatory blog post for the Wagoner Foreign Study Fellowship…and was written two weeks ago.

Because the Smithsonian is an American institution, I was mainly surrounded by Americans and not Panamanians. I lived in a bit of a “science bubble,” which may not necessarily be Panamanian culture, but still something that required me to adjust accordingly. I experienced culture shock of a different kind, one that was more directly related to the field I want to go into after graduation.

Working in science, especially in the field, requires grit, endurance, and determination. A day in the field usually means a physically intensive 9-hour day in the ocean or on land, collecting samples and taking measurements of the ecosystem. You pass out as soon as you finish eating dinner, unable to do much of anything else due to exhaustion. You also have to prepare to wake up early in the morning to put on your swimsuit that is still wet from the day before.

In my experience, science takes no breaks – samples can be sensitive and require proper treatment, regardless of what day of the week it is. For the first two months of my summer, I worked six days a week every week in order to collect everything that was needed to be analyzed later in the molecular lab. I thought things would calm down after these long days in the field, but the molecular lab was not any different. There is no strict 9-5 work schedule, because DNA is sensitive and most protocols I started required I finish them all the way through before leaving. I constantly needed to be productive and working or else I would not get done at a reasonable hour. In the molecular lab, I worked 12-hour days about half the time, but mostly got both Saturdays and Sundays off.

Needless to say, the largest culture shock I experienced while in Panama was the culture of overworking. Everyone, not just my group, was subject to long and highly productive work days. The pressure of finishing projects as quickly as possible comes less from a single person or boss and more from the competitive nature of funding that is ever increasing in the science field. In order to start one project, in order to get more money, in order to have employment, you have to finish what you already have on hand – and what you have on hand better be good, because it’s probably a stepping stone to what happens next.

These reasons, external to me and who I worked with, are why I’ve come to terms with how stressed out and anxious I was as a product of this summer. There were sources of stress that I could not see or control that were affecting my daily life – but no one is to blame. The best I could do was remain optimistic, positive, helpful, and generous with my time. I also continued to express my gratitude for other peoples’ help – most of the time, I felt like I was inconveniencing people, and the least I could do was give a sincere thank you. It’s hard to remember to be gracious and acknowledge people for the work they do in this type of environment, because it’s expected of you to overwork and not complain about it. As long as my days were, there was always someone (probably my PI) working even more. It took me a long time to really stop taking everything so personally, which helped a lot.

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the downs I had this summer, because there were many. My project intimidated me and challenged me to rise to the occasion. I am so relieved that it is done now and everything worked, and now I feel very grateful for having such a difficult (at times) experience. I genuinely learned so much about so many aspects of marine biology (and I still have so much to learn about data analyses), and I could not have done that if I felt relaxed and detached from my work. I was totally immersed and treated like a real scientist, without much room for error. The worst thing to do in these kind of situations is be anxious and nervous – something I really had to combat in the last month I was here. In an environment that feels very tense, you have to learn to remain calm and relax. Kind of weird that I learned how to zen out at a molecular lab, but even faking that feeling was crucial for some of my last days where every day I was learning and doing a new skill.

The one thing that I have really appreciated having in Panama is independence, but independence is also one thing I have missed from the United States. I’ve gotten independence working on my own project and mainly calling all of my own shots, but I still don’t feel comfortable getting around Panama on my own to explore it. In Houston, I can get into my car and drive to wherever I want to go without having to worry about a language barrier or my personal safety, but I never fully got over those aspects of Panama, unfortunately. Of course, I also miss having my friends and parents close-by. I cannot wait to see them!

Happy to announce that my three+ months in Panama has resulted in one tiny tube containing 60 microliters of data!!!! That’s basically one fat drop of liquid containing all of the DNA I sampled in the ocean.

This is literally all I have to show for my work right now.

To visualize the craziness of how far we’ve come with molecular tools and sequencing, I’m including what all it took to get this tiny tube:

1) Collect 144 samples from the ocean every day for three weeks and filter them on the boat for DNA on a small circle of material that gets put into a falcon tube.

Look at all these places I visited! Not included are the boat docks I also sampled at around the main island.

4) Dilute your extracts, set up hand-sized (!) PCR plates, and target the part of the DNA sequence you want (I wanted a region of the DNA that characterizes fish/metazoans from each other and not everything else) and add on primers that are unique DNA ID’s for later analysis. Clean up those plates with all of your samples….very gingerly.

4) Combine samples all into one row of another hand-sized PCR plate. Remember to breathe since everything still looks like there’s nothing in it but you know there’s something in it.

5) Ligate (add) on adapter (more DNA) sequences to further “multiplex” or differentiate your sequences from one another and….combine everything…everything you’ve worked so hard to not cross-contaminate, into one tube. Adding this photo again to emphasize how freaking tiny this tube and volume of liquid is.

Rejoice if the gel electrophoresis and DNA quantification tell you what you did was correct (this was also done throughout all of the steps mentioned above).

THIS EGGHEAD IS SO HAPPY!!

Working in a molecular lab for the first time ever on my samples was so nerve-wracking! I have never lost trust in myself so much as I have here. Staring into the tiniest amounts of clear liquid, going insane over how meticulous I needed to be in tracking my samples from one tiny well to another, and feeling satisfied with what I have accomplished at the end of each day have all taught me important lessons about my self-perception and confidence. It’s a mental game, one that I went into head-first. Every single thing I did (other than running a gel) was my first go at a protocol I had never done before on my samples…no trial runs. Plus, the days were melting away and I could feel the pressure of my departure date looming upon me. I cannot tell you how many times I stared into small tubes of clear liquid with my heart in my stomach and anxiousness in full swing, when I doubted myself and my ability to pipette correctly and accurately. I’m honestly quite shocked that my samples worked (well!) and that I have DNA worth sequencing.

If you don’t trust your samples and don’t trust yourself, you’ll never get a project done. Believe in your work and your ability to execute it. I’m still not confident in myself or my work (yet), despite the numbers and gels telling me so. But just because I can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. I guess that can apply to a lot of things.

Anyways I just wanted to express my RELIEF and GRATITUDE that I am done with what I set out to do in Panama. I board my flight home in three days!