One of the many ways to become a life-long learner is to question how something works and how to develop a deeper understanding of it through research. Without people asking questions and the willingness to delve into the unknown, we wouldn’t be living in the advanced technological world we are in today. There are many different aspects to research and it does not have to be limited to a laboratory setting with test tubes and beakers. It can simply be a scholar cracking open several old textbooks and synthesizing information in a more orderly fashion. Students often fear the word “research”, but I believe it is because it stretches the limits of what we know and pushes us to dig deeper to what is not understood. To me, research can be broken down into four simple steps, asking a question, gathering data, drawing conclusions and sharing the results with others.
Most of the time, asking a research question is the easy part, but figuring out where to start hunting for information on the topic is where it can become difficult. Many students look for the easy answer and have a hard time not straying to Google after five minutes. But learning information literacy and synthesis skills show integrity, work ethic, and the ability to solve complex problems on one’s own which is necessary in a future career. In Honors FYEX, I learned multiple different ways on how to gather information from the MNSU library database, and how to assess if a certain article I found was a good resource to pull topics from. I was also encouraged to visit the reference desk at the library for additional help on projects and to find a research mentor through emailing professors with similar research interests as mine.
The next step to the research process is to develop a hypothesis, organize ideas/topics, and gather data. I learned most of these skills from my General Biology class while doing research on photosynthesis and have continued to evolve these skills throughout my other science classes. Creating a hypothesis can be an art to learn, and I have graduated from writing “if,then” statements, to questioning how subcellular processes work, based on data I have extrapolated from other experiments. Learning various ways to format the research gathered was also an important tool I have gained. In a Technical Communications class, I discovered ways to format different research and workplace topics with figures and legends to help a reader understand the information trying to be communicated. This step is often challenging for me as it is comparable to writing a thesis statement for a paper. It takes extra thought and often needs to be revised several times, and often different professors had different styles for how they wanted reports to be formatted, making it confusing for students what method to follow.
Not only is being able to format data integral for researchers to display their information, it is also needed to help draw conclusions. Research concludes with several questions, what did you learn, how did you get from point A to point B, and how does this contribute to what the field already knows. To put the question simply, “So what?”, what can you say about your research. Not only have I done this in biology classes, but I have also worked on this by doing original research with Dr. Secott in Microbiology. I worked on developing a way to grow cells more rapidly in culture through placing cells in varying environments to stimulate their growth. This was important to understanding how one could create a vaccine for the disease. Through my research I learned many technical skills such as pipetting, how to do cell cytometry, solution calculations, and sterilization techniques. This cell research project and my various classes taught me that research isn’t done to “prove” something, it is done to discover the unknown and continue to validate what is known. Working on my own research project proved very daunting as I practiced techniques None the less, this project taught me that there is purpose behind testing negative controls and recording all data found as I had no other experiments to compare my results to. Recording the data was important not only for my own sake, but for ethical implications that allow other to replicate the experiment.
One must have an ethical code of standards to live by when doing research. Today, students have the vast knowledge of the internet, access to millions of historical articles, scholarly journals, databases, etc. Then there is the inadequate and incorrect information waiting to pounce on an overly exhausted teen, whose paper is due at 8:00 A.M. A big example where I have seen unethical research is when students compare their results with another team to find out they have completely different answers in lab settings. The students consult the teacher to find their results have been contaminated, and so they change their numbers to better reflect the experiment by copying others answers or finding the answers online. In a high school laboratory setting, it’s just a difference of a grade, in real life, it could mean life or death in new pharmaceutical studies in the medical field. Students need to understand that falsifying results or copy and pasting an article into a paper of their own is unethical.
The point of research is to gain knowledge and understanding through questioning and problem solving using one’s own brain, to use evidence to back up the findings of the experiment/research project and sharing the research within the existing community of researchers in the field. For my Developmental Biology class, I created an animated video about tooth development as a research project. I loved the project as it revolved around my future career and decided to present it at the Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS) on April 10th, 2018. I created an abstract for the project revolving around the process I used to research and create the video itself, rather than analyzing data. This was the first time I had submitted a school project to be presented and judged in front of others and I was extremely nervous to share my work in front of other individuals. Although I didn't present as well as I wanted, I was able to listen to other presentations and gain feedback on my own project to further improve my skills.
Although research can be quite frightening when trying to find a place to start, it’s a challenge I can’t wait to begin. Gaining more knowledge through information literacy and synthesis, following ethic guidelines, and having future research goals is the best way to get my research plans underway. One day in the future, instead of writing about my research goals, I will be writing on this keyboard my research accomplished and what I hope to do next!