LEADERSHIP REFLECTION

RISEbio member

         Starting my freshman year, I was part of the RISEbio Learning Community. The program extends over three semesters. My position in the learning community was to perform research under a professor that was assigned to me through the program. Other members of the RISEbio community worked with me in the same classes and research. We met three times a week to conduct research, wrote blogs and grants, and presented my research results to a school wide committee. 

The nature of research is always unpredictable. Some days experiments will be running smoothly, where others the results will just continuously be negative. Coming from a boarding school, I understood how quickly things can go sideways once you lose interest and the importance of having an optimistic view on the situation when gathering negative results. On my strength finder results my third competency was Futuristic. This means I’m inspired by what my future holds and try to energize others with their vision of the future. With my background and personality, I tried my best to keep a positive attitude on the research and with my lab partners. Throughout my time doing research under RISEbio. I had to not only learn about the particular research strategies we were being taught, but I had to adjust to working with my partner’s strategies when doing research. This hurdle made it hard for my team to communicate at times. We were consistently slow and messing up when starting research as everyone was individually working rather than working as a team. I worked hard with my team to come up with plans and procedures before the research period in order to stop this inconsistency. Taking this extra step to fix the problem taught me that I have to acknowledge people’s strengths as well as catering and identifying to their weaknesses. After my experience from the RISEbio research program, I plan on to take a peer mentor research position and use the lessons I learned into practice.

        As I continue to meet with my team and do research into my last semester with the RISEbio program, I have gained knowledge regarding communicating. Currently, we still have misunderstandings within the group every once in a while. I must continue to actively engage myself in my lab work and keep a productive mind to keep my research team on track. Throughout my last two semesters in RISEbio I have also learned that it is ok to ask for help. During research I have needed to step back from leading the team and acknowledge that I didn’t know the answer. Thus, I had to ask questions to the professor to better understand the material and content. I believe that also relying on my team and professors will continue to make our research productive and organized. I need to embrace the help of my research partners in order to be successful as they have stronger skills and tips in some categories that I lack in. For example, attention to detail. Relying on people around you can be very beneficial, but I will also continue to present strong leadership skills within the lab. I anticipate this learning experience will help with my future physician job by giving me an edge over my peers in research experience, and the understanding of the dynamics of the leadership traits in a research environment. Having started research since Freshman year of college compared to most students who start in their junior years. I have almost double the research experience throughout my undergrad. Also, with the exposer with how to lead a lab since freshman year as well, I have more experience in the fundamentals on how to lead a research team and have more experience in leading teams.