UW Eye Research Institute
Among the youngest trainees are the nine high school students Polans has hosted in his lab. While high school students can’t usually comprehend the full scope of the scientific projects in the laboratory, they can be given a specific question to address during a summer apprenticeship.
Many of these high school students have gone on to pursue higher education in scientific fields. Hoda Ahmadi, currently a third-year UW–Madison medical student, spent two summers in the Polans laboratory as a high school student. “I had no biology background when I started,” says Ahmadi. “But I had a small project that I completed in a summer, and I learned how to present my results.”
Lalita Subramanian, PhD, measures chemotherapeutic drug levels by HPLC.
She also notes that she was exploring medicine, pharmacy, and other career opportunities at the time. Now well into her medical training, she says, “I am much more aware of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ with each patient. I have a sense of the research that underlies the base of knowledge relevant to each medical condition and the treatments we apply. I think research will always be a part of my career path, thanks to my early lab experiences.”
Students entering the University of Wisconsin–Madison find many opportunities to incorporate laboratory time into their curriculum. Polans serves as a mentor to undergraduate students through the Chancellor’s Scholarship Program, a program designed to increase educational opportunities for academically talented underrepresented ethnic minority and disadvantaged students, and through the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, which helps first- and second-year undergraduates get hands-on research experience through individually-designed mentored research projects.
Polans notes, “I watch undergrads develop independence over the course of a semester or two. They integrate what happens in the lab with their coursework, and they learn to take direction of a project. Students at this level can be expected to devise a hypothesis, design and conduct experiments to test their hypothesis, and interpret the results of their experiments.”
“I’ve learned more about techniques and research than I learned in class. The class projects are like recipes in a cookbook, but my project in the Polans lab requires me to have a broader understanding of what I am doing and why,” says junior Mike Aberger. “Even when I have an experiment that doesn’t work, I’ve learned to think through the steps of why it is not working. Should I change the ...(Next)(Previous)