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Hi everyone! My name is Phoebe Ting, and I am a junior at Bensalem High School. I have lived here my entire life with my parents and my sister, and I love it here!
 At school, I am the captain of the varsity swim team, which is what I spend the majority of my time doing… Seriously, I’ve been swimming since before I could walk. I love the self-discipline that comes with the sport as well as the time I get to spend with my friends. I’m also involved in the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), Mathletes, and the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science (PJAS). Through conducting experiments and presenting my findings to judges, PJAS has majorly influenced my decision to pursue a career in STEM and join the TRIP program. I am also passionate about giving back to my community as I’m a member and served as the secretary of my school’s Community Service Club. I enjoy combining this passion for helping the community and my love for creativity in student government, where I plan and design school events to boost spirit and morale. Additionally, as a part of my school’s mock trial team, I currently portray a food critic blogger, which is VERY on-brand for me. I enjoy trying out new restaurants -- though, Chipotle will always be my comfort food. Outside of school, I am a certified Emergency Medical Technician, which allows me to have a hands-on application and real-world experience of topics I’ve learned in school. I also volunteer in a children’s hospital in my free time where I can connect with people in my community by doing the thing I love to do most: talking. I am also looking forward to combining my love for swimming and helping others by teaching swim lessons to kids. Although I know I want to pursue a career in STEM, I’m not entirely sure what I want to do, so I’m grateful that TRIP gives me the opportunity to explore my interests. I’m looking forward to this experience to be able to design an independent research question and carry out an experiment. For my kickoff experiment, I will be measuring how Valerian and disrupted circadian rhythms affect sociability. Although we’ve only had one week of class so far, I can’t wait to see what the rest of this program has in store for me. I’m already having so much fun, and I can’t wait to learn more!
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I found that soap decreased motility, as predicted by my hypothesis, and that Vitamin D3 essentially had no effect on motility, proving the latter part of my hypothesis wrong. After the experiment, I made a slideshow presenting my project and its results. The process of creating the slideshow and Dr. Leystra and Dr. Valdes’ insightful comments taught me how to present my findings to not my peers but also a more general audience. Overall, this kickoff experiment exposed me to what my independent project will be like, whether it be making drug stocks, performing assays, collecting and analyzing data, or presenting.  For my independent project, I decided to study the effect of microbiome health on motility. I chose this topic as many aspects of our lifestyles can lead to decreased microbiome health, such as stress, lack of sleep, diet, inactivity, and improper antibiotic use. I decided to study the effect on motility as it is not directly correlated to microbiome health, and I think it would be interesting to see how overarching the effects of poor microfloral health can be. To answer my research question, I plan to create 4 groups of flies (control, pro/prebiotic-exposed, antibiotic-exposed, and pro/prebiotic + antibiotic-exposed) and perform the negative geotaxis and larval locomotion assays on them to collect data on the magnitude of their movement. I will start this process next week and I am BEYOND excited!  Until next time.
Hi everyone! I’m back, and I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the TRIP program. I have learned so much in the past few weeks, from how to transfer and sort flies to different behavioral assays. My favorite part so far has been presenting my kickoff experiment to my peers. For this experiment, I studied the effects of Valerian and disrupted circadian rhythms on the sociability of fruit flies. To determine the sociability levels of the fruit flies, I placed them in chambers and calculated their distance after 15 minutes; the closer the distance between the flies, the more social they were. I found that Valerian increased sociability and constant darkness in flies (a.k.a disrupted circadian rhythms) decreased sociability.  This piqued my interest in sleep deprivation, especially because of its relevance among teenagers. It feels like all high schoolers are constantly lacking sleep and self-medicating with coffee and energy drinks despite the potential negative effects. Naturally, I fell down a rabbit hole of researching energy drinks and their effects. Initially, I planned to study how sleep deprivation and energy drinks affect cognitive function for my independent research project. However, after discussing this idea with the instructors, I decided to tweak my project to focus specifically on energy drinks and their short-term and transgenerational effects on fruit fly motility. To study this, I will be performing the negative geotaxis and larval locomotion assays. I’m excited to see whether there are differences in motility between the short-term and transgenerational flies. I can’t wait to share my results in the next post!!
I can proudly say I’ve been a “lawyer” for the past two years. If I were to tell the story of how I joined the Mock Trial team, it would take a whole day, but I can keep it short and sweet; I remember passing objection notes to my brother from the corner of his desk while he faced the computer screen. This was during his online Mock Trial “trial.” Ever since those days, I’ve held onto my goal of competing at mock trials until I graduate. If it isn’t obvious yet, it’s one of my favorite communities. In three days, it will be our second round of competition, so we have been busy preparing nonstop. Wish us luck!  Speaking of community, I feel myself most attached to my Muslim brothers and sisters out there. I don’t see many at my school, so I was excited to meet a hijabi at TRIP yesterday! I’m sure there are Muslims at my school that I haven’t had the chance to meet, so I’m in the process of starting a Muslim School Association (MSA) club by the end of this month. At the beginning of my high school career this year, I was eager to be a part of the MSA to connect with other Muslims. It’s common in other schools, but East didn’t have one yet, so now I’ve made it my goal to establish one as soon as possible. Hopefully, it will expand into a larger community as time goes by. By the end of these blogs, this club will be up and running.
Yesterday was our first day of TRIP. It was an exciting experience since I got to meet both of the directors, Dr. Leystra and Dr. Purdy, the teaching instructors, Dr. Valdes and Mr. Cozzone, and the teaching assistants, Anoosha and Niki. We got to try out the micropipettes and set up our drugs and stressors which we will be testing next class. At the beginning, I was nervous but as time progressed, we got to see a glimpse of what awaited us for the next three months. I can already tell we’ll make great memories with the team as I have met many goal-driven people. By working together, we’ll develop strong collaboration skills and leave Trip with useful ideas. I might start at zero today, but I aim to reach higher by the end of this trip. I’ve come here to sharpen my thinking skills and stretch my capabilities by challenging myself with the knowledge that I know I can achieve if I work hard enough. I truly want to make use of every opportunity that’s provided in this program.  |
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