Fly-ing To The Finish Line by Erin Suter

It is hard to believe that my TRIP is almost over. The last couple weeks have been packed with repetitions of my assay, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. We are finally reaching the final countdown for the final symposium, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic to share my findings with the TRIP community. 

For my independent project, I decided to compare the effects of nicotine to the effects of vape juice on sociability. My experimental groups consisted of vape with nicotine, vape without nicotine, nicotine sulfate, and most importantly, the control. I was interested in this topic because I constantly catch peers vaping in and out of school and I wanted to know how it was affecting them. So little is known about vape juice itself and side effects are commonly overlooked. Why sociability though? Well, a known side effect of nicotine is that it temporarily boosts your mood, but when going through withdrawal, the opposite occurs. This led me to wonder if vape juice and/or vape juice combined with nicotine would have those same effects.

Using the Social Space assay to gather my data, I collected results that matched my initial hypothesis! The vape with nicotine had the most social flies, while the control group had the least social. The vape without nicotine and nicotine sulfate had about equal sociability. While I had predicted this finding, I was still shocked to see it was accurate. It is crazy a drug like nicotine sulfate and vape juice can have similar side effects, but yet there are so many users that don’t know this! I hope I can spread word about my findings and help make others aware of the scary, yet true realities of vape juice! 

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While I am sad my TRIP journey is coming to an end, I am so happy to have had such an experience. The people I have met on this journey are unforgettable and I am very fortunate to have worked and collaborated with them. I learned how to persevere through failures and how to be optimistic when results aren’t as I expected. If I could relive this experience, I would do it in a heartbeat. Thank you, TRIP!