LA and Phytoplankton: A Summer of Discovery
Hello! I’m excited to talk about my summer experience as a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student for the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability.
My name is Gustavo Lopez-Fleming, originally from Aurora, Colorado, I am now pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In my free time I enjoy playing volleyball, watching Japanese animation, and hanging out with new friends!
Although I am an engineer at heart, I have a passion for environment and sustainability, which led me to apply to the USC Wrigley Institute’s REU program in coastal ocean processes. I wanted to see the possible connections between my technical education and environmental research. When I found out I had been accepted into the program, I excitedly packed my bags and came straight from New Hampshire to California.
After moving into my apartment and meeting my roommate, Isaac Xie from Middlebury College, I quickly set out to meet my research mentor for the summer and hit the ground running on my research project.
Nevertheless, upon meeting my summer mentor, Feixue Fu, and a tour of the Hutchins Lab—the phytoplankton lab where I would be spending my summer—she informed me that their focus had shifted away from the project I had initially committed to. Then came the challenge of finding 10-week long biology research project for an engineering undergraduate who had never taken a biology class before in his life.
After about a week of brainstorming, I was given the responsibility to develop a new protocol for the lab that focused on detecting the concentration of nitrate in seawater samples using a chemical reagent whose primary ingredient was vanadium (III) chloride. This blog will stray away from the scientific details of my project and focus more on my summer experience, but here is the link to the research poster I made at the end of the summer.
Although I like to think that my final poster looks pretty good, I was incredibly lost. I had a lack of understanding of the foundational concepts to my project like molarity, dilutions, creating standards, etc. At first, I felt very out of place. I felt like I was supposed to know how to do all these things like my fellow REU participants, but I didn’t. I remember my mentor’s jaw dropping when I revealed that I had never used a pipette before.
I decided that I didn’t want to be defined by this; I wanted to no longer be the person in the lab who had to be watched as he used a pipette. I decided the only way from the bottom of the expertise food chain was up, and that meant I had to seriously up my game. I raided Goodwill for AP Biology review books, lived on YouTube watching lab tutorials, and turned into a question-asking machine. I wasn’t just trying to finish a research project anymore; I was proving to myself that I could handle this challenge. At the end I made a research poster eligible for national biological sciences conferences on concepts that were once unfamiliar to me. Although my summer was unlike anything I expected it to be, I learned how to apply myself and that challenges where my knowledge is questioned are just chances to prove myself. After this program, I’m looking forward to continuing expanding my knowledge in unknown areas, no matter how uncomfortable it is to start from knowing nothing. This is my personal takeaway from this summer’s USC Wrigley Institute REU program. The program also gave me incredible insight into what research is like and prompted me to think about graduate school, something I had never considered before.
While the above anecdote was about my research experience, one of the benefits of spending your summer at USC doing research is that you are in one of the most activity-filled cities in the country: Los Angeles. Below are some of the things I did outside of the lab during my summer. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
