I experienced a lot of challenges in my STEM internship this year. My mentor and I had pretty different schedules, and in the first semester, we only met in person every other week. That slowed down our progress a little bit, but by the second semester, we'd figured out a good plan for meeting, which made the research a lot easier. We also ran into some challenges with the research itself. Even though we were relatively sure that the model was a good fit for the data, we still couldn't get conclusive results. It took a lot of trial and error, and experimenting with parameters. However, on the very last day of my internship, we finally got a good distribution!!
Dr. Miller was a wonderful teacher, and even though the concepts were hard, I learned a lot about evolutionary biology and the process of research itself. My proudest moment was when we finally got a distribution that had convergence around the mean, even though I'd accepted by that point that we might not get the results we were looking for. Overall, I had a wonderful experience, and I know that I'll go into college prepared to do high-level scientific research.
For next year's Signature participants, especially for the STEM interns, I would advise them to be prepared for lots of trial and error in the research. We often didn't know what was causing our problems, so it just took a lot of experimentation and a little bit of luck to get the results we were looking for.
I'd like to thank Dr. Miller for a wonderful experience this year. Good luck to next year's Signature participants!
