The TRIP Experience by Peter Yang

It's been two weeks since I wrote my last blog.  Quite a lot has happened in the past two weeks, and I want to share a couple of my learnings to date about TRIP.

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First is independence.  Each of us is to bring a research idea and that idea defines what each will do throughout the program.  This sounds like no big deal, but to me it’s an entirely different experience.  I have done many science projects that would eventually reach some results; in a way, what I did before was based on ideas that had been demonstrated to be true or false.  At TRIP, for the first time, I started with a relatively raw idea, had to think about how to design the experiments, and needed to consider the very likely scenario that my research may have no result… It feels real (and exciting!).  That said, I had lots of help in the past two weeks from my advisors who guided me and helped me think differently.  Such a degree of freedom is not entirely unexpected; I want to call it out because it is a new experience for me and it started to help me learn more about myself and how I work.

Second is that finding a research topic is a lot harder than I anticipated.  Two weeks ago, I had lots of ideas that I thought were good.  I was inspired by topics like water pollution, over-the-counter drug addiction, and others.  All sound exciting and meaningful.  But I soon realized how impractical they are once I needed to turn the topic into measurable results over a three-week period.  That thinking process finally took me to an idea that feels very personal to me, that is sleep deprivation.  I never get that much sleep due to extracurricular and school work.  My parents and my pediatrician constantly warn me that 8 hours of sleep is vital for good brain function.  It made me wonder: if someone has to give up sleep time, is there a minimum number of hours that you can give away but cause relatively less damage to your health?  And can sleep deprivation be reversed by catch-up sleep?  That became the topic for my research.

Until next time, stay healthy and wish you at least 8 hours of sleep each day.