Photo Credit: Louis Reed. Photo obtained from unsplash.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a mom shriek from my living room and ran to see my mom standing on top of a chair, pointing at a mouse scurrying across the floor. I shrieked and quickly climbed on to the same chair as her. I looked at my mom expectantly, waiting for her to go and save me from this four-legged fiend. She was waiting for me to save her, because apparently, once you learn how to handle mice for your neuroscience research, you become the official mouse-catcher in the house. In a tragic but funny way, that interaction with the poor mouse was the closest I felt to doing neuroscience research in months.
The sad fact of the matter is that there just isn’t a lot of work I can do for my lab after leaving campus back in March. Most of the work I do is dealing with ‘physical’ tasks at the lab— in fact, most of my work involves handling mice in some form. Sometimes that means performing surgery on the mice, other times that means running them through a maze, but the one certain thing about my day at the lab is that it’ll involve me cleaning up mouse droppings. Not surprisingly, it’s pretty hard to perform surgery on a mouse that’s sitting 500 miles away from you. Indeed, it has been hard for me to still feel like a researcher – especially at the start of the pandemic – particularly because my notion of research has been so tied to the physical acts I perform in the lab.
I’m sure I am not the only undergrad feeling like this. It’s hard when so many of your friends are able to do their internships from home, but you’re stuck, unable to do anything. I’ve heard of students who are trying to create some form of lab life at home— they’re running undergrad journal clubs, where students meet over zoom and discuss a different research article every week. I’ve also heard of students who are meeting with their lab once a week, just so that they learn about what work is going on in their lab while all of the undergrads are still at home. If you’re missing research, these are some great options to consider. But I’ve decided to allow myself to take these couple of months away from neuroscience research. For the past two years, my definition of research has involved me working only on neuroscience topics. That’s not always been the type of research I’ve done, though. Some undergraduate researchers are attracted to research because it’s something new—something they haven’t had the opportunity to do before. For others, it’s a more familiar exercise. You might not have realized that what you were doing was actually research, but when you sit down to do more formal research, you realize that this is an activity you’ve engaged in before.
After all, research doesn’t mean having to sit in a lab— research can be going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Research can be reading a Buzzfeed article on all the historical inaccuracies in Hamilton and then investigating what really did happen to Peggy? It can be looking into how they make non-sticky lipgloss after watching a TikTok about it. It can be reading public health journals for information on this pandemic. I know a lot of us were expecting to spend our summer mixing chemicals or looking at brain slices, but this pandemic has forced all of us to adapt in every single avenue of life—research included. For me, it’s been better to just remove myself from my lab work as opposed to doing a pale imitation of the work I want to be doing. I’ve actually been having a lot of fun listening to true crime podcasts and further researching cases I find interesting. I’m allowing myself to take a break (which isn’t something Columbia students are generally good at) to explore whatever pops into my head. I’ve broadened my definition of research, and have finally been able to stop feeling like I’m wasting my summer.