The Beginning by Rachel McCabe

 I wanted to do TRIP because I love science, and I think the program is a good way to experience what a career in research could be like.

Hi everyone! My name is Rachel McCabe and I’m going into my senior year at Friends’ Central School.
My favorite subjects are science and history. I’m also on the Field Hockey and Track teams, and I play the flute in the orchestra. Outside of school, I love to hang out with my friends, watch Netflix (I’ve recently been very into Grey’s Anatomy and Criminal Minds), and bake. I love to experiment and try out new recipes and foods, but I’m gluten free which can make it a little difficult. This summer, when I’m not at TRIP, I will be teaching swim lessons at Swarthmore College. I’ve been doing it for the past two summers, and always had a lot of fun. I wanted to do TRIP because I love science, and I think the program is a good way to experience what a career in research could be like. 

Having finished my first week, I’ve already learned so much. It’s kind of crazy to me that the classes are five hours long, as so far they have felt much shorter. The first day, we learned how to make fly food and use micro-pipettes. I also found out that I will be experimenting next week to find out how constant darkness and St John’s Wort (a drug typically used for depression in humans) affect the social interactions of flies. I will be doing this by using the Social Space Assay, which monitors the distance between flies. I predict that constant darkness will cause an increase in the distance between flies, while St John’s Wort will cause the flies to be close together. 

The second day, we learned how to make Graphical Abstracts, made grape plates, and sorted flies. I thought it was really cool to make the grape plates, as we were able to use the pipetting tools in a much more practical way. We were also able to turn a liquid mixture into a gel by heating it, which was really interesting. Next, we learned how to anesthetize fruit flies with CO2 , and sort them into groups of males and females. After sorting, we placed 30 males and 30 females into each of our vials, in preparation for our experiments next week. When we first started sorting flies, I had a lot of trouble with it, but it quickly became much easier. I’m really excited for the next couple weeks of the program. We have already learned so much in the first week, I can’t imagine what the next four will be like.