MENTOR INTERVIEW REFLECTION

This is an interview I did with my mentor, Mai Tran. To read a short summary/reflection, click here. To listen to the audio, scroll to the bottom!

Carla: What college did you attend? Why did you choose that college?

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Mai:  So, I attended UCLA. I chose it because… well, I was choosing between Berkeley and UCLA and I visited both colleges and then I visited UCLA. I felt that I really fit in to the environment. We took the tour of the campus, the campus is very pretty and well, you know, it helps with the decision, but it’s not the only factor obviously. They talked to us about what was available on the campus, different major, they have a variety of majors, very very STEM. I knew that I was interested in a lot of STEM fields and they have big programs for that. At the time they also mentioned to us that as a student you can apply for the on campus fellowship that would support you to do research in science while you’re in college. So then I wouldn’t have to find another job just to work after and I thought that was a great way to allow students to learn about sciences and research without any financial burden on the student.

Let’s see what else is there?

The student that I interacted with spoke about how while the classes are hard, there are a lot of clubs, activities, and professional societies you could join. I was pre-med at the time so they talked to me about all these pre-med societies that I could join once I came to the university and it provided an opportunity for me to network with alumni. They brought in alumni that that talked to us. It was a very positive, welcoming experience and the students seemed to have both study and also fun outside of studying and that pretty much sold me. When I visited Berkeley, you know, they have an equally great academic program. I guess I didn’t really feel like I fit in. Yeah, just different feelings. It’s a little hard to describe, but I felt like I really fit in at UCLA so I chose to go there.

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Carla: What is something that you wish someone would have told you before entering laboratory research?

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Mai: I had the opportunity to do research  when I was an undergrad so I actually knew quite a bit of what it means to be a researcher. Meaning you know a lot of times projects will not work and it will fail. So that in science in research in particular failure is basically how we figure how things work. While that was rough, that wasn't too much of a surprise. I think what was surprising for me that I wish someone had told me was the fact that grad school for research in particular is very unstructured and that was surprising for me to deal with because you know through high school and through undergrad, you have a very structured life. You go to class from this hour to this hour, you go home this is the amount of homework, we are going to have a test on this day. going to test you on your knowledge. So grad school, was basically like “Oh, we are going to teach you some, you know, additional stuff, but you know quite a bit already and you’re going to learn more when you enter the lab.” The problem is, we only meet with our committee once a year. There is no quote on quote, hard deadline for you to get things done and so over the year I learned to make those deadlines for myself because I realized how much of a tendency I have to procrastinate. So yes, I wish I was more aware of that, how unstructured grad school is. So I really developed the ability to time manage, but I didn’t start that on day one. So after a year I was like “This is interesting, I could’ve done so much more if I planned better,” and so your second year you’re like “ Okay, I’m planning better now.” Your third year, you’re like “Okay I really need to figure it out, give myself my own deadline.”

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Carla: What is the best part about doing research? What are the payoffs to this field?

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Mai: Research, I think it really taps into your innate curiosity about how things work and I think that’s something I truly appreciate. You have the opportunity to, for example, in our cases, we looked at limb development. You have the opportunity to literally just look at the tissue be like ““In one animal, the mouse, you see muscle, in another animal, the jerboa, you don’t see muscle. You ask, “What happened to the muscle?”’ and you have the resources to go and you chase that question of your interest. As you learn more about, why is there not muscle in this jerboa species, again you continue to have the opportunity to ask “What about this possibility? What about that possibility,” and you go and you test each of those. It is satisfying when you’ve found and answer or when you’ve found a thing that's like “Oh, this is what happened,” so I think that is very rewarding. Obviously that doesn't happen very often, it’s more like “Does this happen?”, the answer is no. “Does this happen?”, the answer is no. But when you find that “Yes, this is what happened, it’s very rewarding. The payoff for that is the ability to be patient so I'm very impatient. So if you're giving me a math equation, two plus two equals four. I know how to do addition, I know I can solve that problem, but research is like “Does two plus two really equal four?” For lack of a better word, it explains it so you go and you ask “How does two plus two equal four?”  So patience is something I have learned to do along the way where you just have to keep at it in the sense like think outside the box. Where, if people have already published about looking at “X,Y, and Z,” and I have looked at “X,Y, and Z,” but none of that is describing what I am seeing, then i should think about “Okay, what about the possibility of W” for example. You go and try to figure out what that W is. So the payoff, I guess, is that you learn to be very patient and you not get too frustrated  to the point where you give up on your quest to find your question of interest.

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Carla: How have you ended up here? What were the steps you needed to take in order to get here?

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Mai: So, when I entered grad school, there’s two routes that you can go about this. So one is a big umbrella program which is the one I’m currently in where they allow you to do rotations so you come in and say “I am interested in immunology, so i’m going to do a couple weeks of research in this particular lab that does immunology. I’m also thinking that I might be interested in development, I’m going to do this.” So you have the opportunity to try out a few labs and try to experience what it is that they’re doing and what kind of questions they’re asking. That’s one type of program. There another type of program where you came in and you already know, you have your heart set on basically studying immunology. You reach out to the PI and join the lab as soon as you enter grad school. The advantage of that is you start day one working on the thing that you know you want to work on. I joined the umbrella program because I was curious about many things, I feel like I am happy doing a lot of things in general, but am unclear of what specific field I want to enter. So i tried out a few labs and when I rotated through Kim, it was just a very different experience because my background is in immunology. So development was very intimidating to me, like I didn’t take a lot of classes, actually I think I only took maybe like one very generic class. So I was like “Wow, this is overwhelming,” but I sat and read up on the information that the lab does. Also another thing that stood out to me as I did my rotation was how much mentoring she provides for her students. Coming into grad school, I had never worked independently in a company before. I have friends who have done that and if you have that experience, you are more technically experienced and so you’re like “Okay I know what I want to do, I am going to go in, I want to be an independent researcher at that point.” I needed a little more mentoring and support and Kim basically provided that in a sense that she hands-on trained me to do protocol. She really explained and sat with me [saying] this is the question that the lab is interested in and of the stuff that I read, where do I think we should take this question? What would be the next question you would ask after asking the first question. So that basically [told me] I was going to get the training that I need which is the ability to think. And sometimes, a lot of the time, back in my first year, I needed a little hints and a nudge from her in order to go in the right direction.

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Carla: What is the best part about working here at UCSD? Cooper Lab?

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Mai: Mentoring for sure, I talked a lot about that. I think the second part is how diverse the lab is in terms in terms of our background. So Haydee comes from a business background so she brought a different perspective coming from a very science background. Adi and Rio come from an international background so I think that kind of opened my eyes to what research is like in different countries outside of America and would I ever be interested in a position outside of this kind of set up. So, that’s interesting. I think the other thing is, more about how Kim manages the lab. She is a very collaborative person. So she is never afraid to reach out and never hesitate to reach out to a different lab so that we can learn stuff. As a trainee, you could initiate a lot of this connection to “Hey can we do something? Can we learn from you?’ but it’s much more fruitful if it comes from a PI because as a trainee you can talk to your friend about the possibility of something but to make it really happens, more easily, at the level of the PI. I think she is always there, like when I was doing electron microscopy, and we are not set up to do that in the lab. So I went to a neighboring lab on campus and I learned it from them and do things at the Salk. Similar with Adi’s work, he does a lot of computational analysis and for a while you run into this problem of how can we accurately compare two genomes of two distantly different species. How do we do that accurately and well? So we collaborated with a lab in Germany who has work on cross species comparison and helped us work on a pipeline that allows to do that analysis. So I think that as a trainee, I benefit from having those connections for future reference. We learn how to reach out to people and collaborate.