The Beginning of My Journey by Evelyn Thomas

​Hello everyone and welcome to my first EVER blog post! My name is Evelyn Thomas, and I’m a sophomore at North Penn High School. I’ll start off with a short introduction about me. Music is a big part of my life. I play the violin, piano, and sing! I am also a Spotify freak and I make new playlists almost every single week. I also enjoy spending time with my friends and family and goofing off with them. Netflix is my addiction (currently rewatching That 70’s Show). These are just some fun facts about me.

Now onto my love for science. Ever since I was a little kid, I have dreamed of becoming a doctor. I used to play make believe and diagnose my stuffed animals. This love for medicine and science has carried on to this day and I hope to achieve my goal. Biology is definitely my favorite subject because there is an unending amount of knowledge you can gain. It explains how things all around us work; everything from animal species and their evolution to the cells that make up our body.

When I found out about TRIP I was so excited because it was a chance for me to get a hands on experience working in a lab. I also wanted to get involved in the TRIP program because I've never gotten the chance to perform research where my own question drives the experiment. I hope that through this independent research I will become a better problem solver and, overall, a better scientist!

​This week was my second week of TRIP and so far, it has been very eventful. Just this week, we finally got to work with the flies, and let me tell you, it was an interesting first experience. This week, we learned how to sort them in terms of sex and then we used what we sorted to use in the behavioral assay we were assigned to test. Since this was my first time EVER working with fruit flies, I have to admit, I was a bit nervous, but it got better the longer I worked with them. Hopefully the next time I have to sort them I won’t take as much time and I’ll be more confident!

​That’s all for now, signing out!