We're in the Endgame Now by Chongwoo Kim

Dread it... run from it... destiny still arrives. The culmination of all 21 MCU movies (12 weeks of TRIP sessions), we have finally reached the endgame (final symposium).

​I came into this program expecting to work in an intense lab, administered by intimidating directors, and working with awkward peers. Instead, I found myself hanging out in a thrilling playground, guided by caring mentors, and making genuine friends. Here’s a little synopsis of what went down during the past 12 weeks.

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The first six weeks of the program was the typical get to know each other, learn about the basics of flies and the lab, all that basic stuff. Even up to this point I was thinking to myself, “shoot, did I really just drag myself into an extra day of school on a Saturday.” My performance status was extremely poor, handing in assignments at the last minute without a genuine desire to learn. This took quite a bit of a dramatic shift with the start of my independent project.  I came across a topic that was very personal and intriguing to me: the vaping epidemic.

When I say that this topic is personal, I mean that I am concerned for the many friends of mine who actively participate in such “badass” activity that supposedly makes them look cool. Since the common defense for “juuling,” as kids my age like to call it, is that it is not actually harmful to the body, I wanted to test how then the nicotine might influence the brain and its tendency to make impulsive decisions.

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It took me quite a while to find a way to do this because there wasn’t an assay that we had in our “techniques packet” that specifically measured impulsivity. Enduring the many failures of ideas that I thought would work, I was able to design a new assay that could measure impulsivity. It involved putting a fly in a dark space with a strong light coming down on the middle where an attractant is placed. Normally, the fly would tend to avoid strong light in a dark space and are less likely to move into the center in an open area, but with the attractant in the middle, I could set the lies up to make impulsive decisions to go in the center. Interestingly, my data showed strong evidence that nicotine did, in fact, increase the fly’s tendency to make impulsive decisions, but the dosage of the nicotine did not seem to make a significant change.

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Despite my rather poor performance towards the beginning, I was actually able to develop a genuine curiosity and desire to learn, and I would like to think that this showed in the improved quality of work I was able to produce throughout my independent project.

All in all, TRIP was an extremely fulfilling experience that introduced me to a world of science that I had absolutely no sight of, and I can tell that there is so much more to explore in this field. I made great friends and even more amazing mentors. Hopefully, I continue to keep in touch with them even after the end of this amazing program (wink).
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Some people move on. But not us. Not us. 

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