Internship Week 3

After my first week of internship, there are many feelings rushing through me: excitement, exhaustion, passion and confusion. I am excited for next week, and ready to continue working on my project. I feel exhausted - but it’s a good type of exhaustion - from the work I've been doing. I feel passionate about my project and the work I’m doing. I’m confused from all the things I’m learning, but it’s keeping me thinking, and I know I will understand it all eventually.

I’m interning virtually at Dr. Brian M. Paegel’s drug discovery lab, where I will be learning and using R, a data science programming language to create Monte Carlo simulations for combinatorial chemistry (don’t worry - I’ll go deeper into what I’m doing in my week 2 blog post). My mentors are Dr. Paegel himself, as well as two graduate students who will be helping me on my internship journey.

My hopes for this internship are to really learn and dive into something not completely ‘new,’ but something that I can really take a plunge into (in this case chemistry -> drug discovery), while still helping me with what I will possibly do in the future.. I hope it can also give me new perspectives and experiences related to labs and chemistry, as well as math and programming. So far, this internship is fulfilling all of those.

My one dream for this internship is that it will significantly help me achieve / in my next internship, job, or wherever I find myself. At this time in my life, I feel that ‘I know,’ what I want to do, but these things can always change. I want an internship experience that I feel I didn’t ever waste much time on: being busy is important. So far, this internship is fulfilling this experience.

Finally, I don’t think I have any fear for this internship itself, but rather a general fear: regret. I don’t want to live with regrets; I don’t want to live with the feeling that I could’ve done more in my internship, or that I chose the wrong internship, or that I disappointed someone. However, I know myself:  I am confident in my abilities, and I am especially confident in my passion for learning.