Christopher Bautista, URAP Apprentice in Professor Ellen Simms' Lab, Integrative Biology:

Please tell us about the project you are currently working on.

I am in an evolutionary Ecology lab, where I am involved in the process of culturing plants: from preparing seeds, sterilizing them, planting them, taking care of them, and inoculating them with bacteria because we are studying the ecological relationship between bacteria and plants, up to the very end when we pull the plants out and measure their biomass, which is where we get out data from.

Can you describe a typical day in the lab?

One of the things I really love about the Simms lab is the diversity of methods we employ even in a single day. For example in a six-hour span,
I could be working in the greenhouse, taking care of the plants I planted, then I could be back in the lab under the hood sterilizing seeds for the next couple of hours, and then I could be in the next room preparing for planting the seeds. Sometimes I work in three different places in the lab in a day. I also have been exposed to bacteria culturing and the genetic analyses of bacteria DNA.

At what phase of the research project did you join the lab?
The project is ongoing, it is a big project, and it had already been designed when I started. I was responsible for learning the theory and the methods all at the same time, which was actually very challenging in the beginning because I had to not just grapple with the conceptual frameworks, but also with the practical frameworks, for example sterile techniques.

That can be a bit of a challenge.

Yes, it was a challenge – I had to learn how to swim fast, basically. (laughs)

Did you get the help that you needed?

Oh yes. Professor Simms and my postdoctoral supervisor often had to repeat things, and I often had to ask the same questions. They also suggested papers for me to read, and I did really learn a lot not only from them but also from other undergraduates. We were teaching each other concepts and clarified different things for each other that we had understood.

It seems there is a lot of teamwork going on, that you have a lot of different people you can draw on for support.

One of the things that was really surprising to me and really refreshing about the Simms lab is that there is a community that is involved in the research from that lab. The Simms lab has weekly meetings where we bring each other breakfast or dinner and we talk about scientific papers that are related to our own interest, but that are also related to the lab project. So a lot of times our discussions were not centered around the project at hand, but centered around concepts, scientific ideas, and that was really a space for sharing, for learning, for teaching.

It sounds as if you are getting a very good idea of what it means to be involved in this kind of research.

It is very rewarding.

You mentioned the community as one aspect that surprised you the most. What aspect do you appreciate the most about this experience?

One of the main things is the community; the conversations that we have are amazing. Another thing that I really enjoy and that makes this experience so rewarding is the fact that cutting edge research and knowledge production is happening every day – the lab is really amazing in the production of original knowledge.

Is there any kind of advice you would have for prospective apprentices?

Yes. One of the things I really worked hard on and put at the forefront of my priorities from the beginning was to make sure I knew what the big picture of the research project was. I knew for any experience to be rewarding, whether it was bending over a lab bench or fertilizing hundreds of plants, was to know that I was contributing to something bigger than just the task at hand, and I was contributing to cutting edge research. A lot of times I would ask my supervisor why am I doing this, what does this mean? What does this procedure allow us to do? And it’s those questions and the answers I got from the people around me, undergraduates as well, that kept me motivated and kept the work rewarding.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

I learned a lot about what is really involved in research. That includes funding, reading other papers. Another aspect, to elaborate on the community of science, is that you do have to be in conversation with other labs, maybe across the country, even across the world, that are studying the same things you are, and they have other aspects that might be beneficial to the project. The academic environment is something I learned a lot about. Another piece of advice would be to really take advantage of the professor and the graduate students, ask them questions about what it is really like to be a professor, to be a graduate student, not limited to what it is like to be in the lab. Through this program I really did get an undiluted, unromantic, but very very rewarding and multifaceted view of what it means to be a scientist.

Thank you very much!