As of the time I’m writing this essay, I’m currently working at the Gingras Lab, running some experiments for a project I designed. About two years ago, this would have been a dream come true for me. At that time, I was just starting to write articles about immunotherapy, and I had no idea how I could turn that into actual science. I want to share my story about these two years, so hopefully, it can help someone else who wants to follow a similar path.
Please note that you should not take this essay as a to-do list. It is simply one of many data points you should consider before you make your own decisions. Many people might disagree with the path that I took, and many people might agree with it. The point is, think about what path is best for you, as I probably have different strengths than you.
Another thing I would like to point out is that you do not have to be a genius kid to be a scientist. To most people, I definitely could have been considered smart, but I wasn’t winning national math competitions or competing in science fairs since I was 10 years old. You will see a lot of these people online, and that can potentially lead you to think that if you aren’t a child genius, you can’t break into research. However, these people aren’t the only ones who go on to do great things. Richard Feynman, for example, famously had an IQ of about 125. It’s still high, but it’s not ridiculously high. The point is, don’t impose limits on yourself. Some fields like math and physics require some natural skill, but even those can be learned in different ways.
Now that the context is set, let’s go back two years to the beginning of my research journey.
Skip this section if you already know that you want to go into research.
Before explaining the how of my journey, I think it’s more important to explain the why. When I was younger, I wanted to be a doctor. It seemed like a good profession to choose, and since I was good at science, I thought it was fitting for me. With the low acceptance rate of medical school in mind, I tried doing a lot of things that were good for my resume—volunteering, piano, lots of clubs, etc. While I did enjoy some of those things, I didn’t enjoy them to the point where I felt the drive to become world-class. That’s when, two years ago, I started research. I became fascinated by all the cool advancements taking place in biotechnology, specifically with treating diseases using our own cells.
At the time, I started research because I wanted to boost my resume for medical school. I didn’t know I was interested in genetic engineering beforehand, and that’s something I think is pretty common. Nobody knows they like something until they try it, and that’s where my main takeaway comes in. A lot of people talk about doing something you are passionate about, not something you think will get you into university. I disagree. The thing you should be optimizing for is trying new things; the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Whether you are a thrill seeker or just trying to find something new for your resume, you are still someone looking for something you are passionate about.
No matter the reason you are trying new things, I think there are two rules to follow. The first is to stop doing something when you feel you don’t enjoy it. In my opinion, the rule “never give up” applies only if you feel you enjoy the thing you are doing but are just in a bad spot. If you don’t enjoy the task, then it’s better to just move on and try something new. I think something that represents this rule well is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when “a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial” (Oxford Languages). In other words, if it’s obvious that you don’t enjoy the activity, quit and try something new even if you feel that you’ve already put effort into it.
Obviously, there are exceptions. If you are close to achieving something that looks cool on a resume, and it won’t take you a lot of effort to push through, then it’s probably better for you to just finish it. Furthermore, you should always have some protection on a resume; if you are approaching grade 12, want to get into a good program, and have nothing to show for university applications, that’s not a good situation. You should always spend a little time getting some solid activities, and spend the rest of your time trying to find something you can be great at. Part of the reason why I support having grades matter in university applications is because they can be a good safety net when applying to universities. That way, students don’t have to worry about finding something they’re good at right away and potentially get stuck in that activity.
In summary, try lots of things as early as you can (but don’t stop because you think it’s too late).
Before I started doing research, I was mainly focused on learning the fundamentals of biology. I did this by exploring different concepts, such as immunology, the central dogma, and my high school curriculum. While a lot of people would say that school is not the best place to learn, I think this is for application-heavy fields, such as programming, robotics, and business. However, in scientific fields like biology, physics, and chemistry, I think the curriculum does a good job at covering the fundamentals of these topics. The important thing, however, is to not just rely on the curriculum for learning. If you find a specific topic interesting, go learn about it more. This can be done through open courses (MIT has a great selection of them on OpenCourseWare), YouTube videos, and textbooks. Do whatever fits your learning style the best. I personally prefer listening to someone teaching, so I watched a lot of YouTube videos. Of course, at a certain point in research, people stop making videos about complex topics, so reading is still a good skill to have. Now, there is an exception to this: don’t go too far in theory. Knowledge expands fractally, so the further you go, the more you will have to cover. If you try to learn everything about biology, you will spend a lot of time learning information you will never use and most likely forget. My suggestion is to instead find a particular niche which you are interested in, and then go deeper into that.
The next thing I did was write about the extra things I learned. Now, I’m not talking about notes—I’m talking about publishing articles. The main benefit of writing about a topic is that you get a very good review of the information, as it’s like teaching someone else about it. The benefit of publishing it online is that it gives you a little credibility, especially when you are young. To the university student looking to get into research, they have the backing of their institution and program. A high school student doesn’t have that. Instead, we have to rely on other sources of credibility, like articles, to show people the competence we have. This has been useful for me at many stages in my research, which I will discuss later in this essay. Finally, publishing articles online is a forcing function for high-quality learning. Sometimes a fear of what other people think about you can be bad, but in some cases, it can actually work to your advantage. By posting an article online, it forces you to cover the material very intricately in order to not look like you’re lazy, uninformed, or a beginner. This doesn’t mean you should try to perfect your article—you will never get there—but rather for you to avoid sloppy learning.
The best articles are usually niche enough that you can go deeper into the subject, but also broad enough that many researchers in your field can read the article and understand it. I’ll use my article as an example. I wrote about CAR-NK therapy for treating cancer; it’s a fairly niche topic, but there was definitely room to go further. I could have talked about targeting a specific receptor for treating multiple myeloma, but that would have limited the number of people who could understand the article. While very targeted content is useful when you are trying to build off of established credibility, it isn’t necessary in this stage.
For a lot of people, this is the hardest part of the journey. There are lots of obstacles with joining a wet lab as a high school student: location, experience, regulations, finding mentorship, etc. Due to these restraints, this stage can look very different for people. Since I live relatively close to downtown Toronto, I benefitted from the vast amount of research labs associated with the University of Toronto, the UHN, and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. Although I’ve only done wet lab research at the latter, having such a condensed environment of biomedical research in one place helps a lot.
If you are in a similar situation as me, then I suggest trying to find an in-person wet lab to join. This makes the experience much more immersive, and you will gain skills that not many people your age will have. It will also be much easier to make friends with the people in your lab and learn from them. If you aren’t close to a research hub, then the next best thing would be to do something online. Even if you want to be a wet lab biologist, there are still a lot of things you can learn (and will have to do) through a computer.
I got my first lab job through a program run by the LTRI: SciHigh. It’s meant to introduce high school students to lab research, and it was a great experience. There are a lot of programs like it elsewhere, and I suggest you apply to as many of these as possible. However, they are also pretty competitive. You can also try cold outreach, getting intros to researchers, or anything else, but there are a lot of really informative videos on this topic, and I think they would be much more helpful than anything I could say. One thing I will say, though, is that my articles were a great starting point for conversation. I talked about what I had recently written about, and that served as proof that I was genuinely interested in the research topics and had the knowledge to contribute.
However, a wet lab isn’t the only way you can start a research project in biology. A really overlooked aspect of biology research is data analysis; labs generate a lot of data, and it’s often hard to organize all that data and get meaningful results from it. There is a plethora of data just sitting in the NCBI GenBank databases, just waiting for someone to get an idea and run some analysis on it. These types of projects are always running in labs, and they do not require a lot of money to run. Even though it’s not ideal if you are interested in wet lab validation and fundamental research, it’s a good starting point for future research.
Working on a professor’s research plan is one thing, but coming up with your own idea and executing it is a completely different thing. There are two main challenges with starting your own project: getting a refined idea and funding. Let’s tackle the easier of the two first.
Getting an idea can be intimidating, especially if you are younger. Luckily, there are a lot of resources to play around with. What I did was talk to a lot of people and build small projects. By talking to a lot of people, you get exposure to new ideas and perspectives. A lot of my best ideas came just from randomly talking to people or reading about them in other papers. Simultaneously, I would build small projects to try and learn new skills while seeing if anything interesting happened. You can still find remnants of these projects throughout my online profiles, and it’s easy to see that a lot of them were quite simple or outright failed. Nevertheless, all of my projects taught me things that I can still pull from in my current work. Finally, make sure to use all available tools to be informed on the idea you’re choosing. This doesn’t mean it has to be perfect, but get an idea of what other people have tried in the past. I recommend using FutureHouse’s Precedent Search to see if other people have tried your idea before.
The other part of starting your own project (if required) is funding. Luckily for us, there are plenty of grant programs that fund projects for young people. The 1517 Fund has compiled a list here. When applying to these opportunities, my advice would be to just explain why your idea matters, why you are the right person for it, and how you will spend the money. People are usually good at explaining the first two but often don’t go into enough detail on the last one. A person will be much more confident giving money to someone who has a very detailed plan on how they will spend the money, as it shows that they not only are serious about the project, but that they have the expertise to think of all these things.
Once you have the right resources for running your experiments, the final part is setting up the space to run them. If you need a physical lab for the work, this will be a challenge. It’s hard enough to get lab experience doing a professor’s project, but even harder to get space for your own project. My advice would be to fall back on your network to see if they have any leads on getting lab space. I was able to get back into the LTRI to run my experiments thanks to the kindness of my supervisor during my March Break program. If you have met a good number of people and have shown them that you are serious about your work, there’s a good chance that someone is willing to help.
Now, time for execution. This is the twisty part of the journey. There will inevitably be many roadblocks in your research, and many of them will be demoralizing. However, take each obstacle as a learning opportunity and figure out what went wrong. You learn a lot from making mistakes, and you will definitely make some along the way. For example, I’ve messed up concentrations, done steps in the wrong order, or mistimed my experiments throughout my work in the lab. I learned from my mistakes, and this has allowed me to become much more efficient and accurate with my work.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s good to have a detailed plan when getting funding. However, you’ll quickly realize that sometimes this plan doesn’t always pan out correctly. You shouldn’t be afraid to make changes to it once you notice something that doesn’t look right or seems inefficient. These alterations can help heavily in the long run.
Finally, know that executing a plan will be hard work. Even if you do enjoy learning about the field, doing work is called work for a reason. These are the moments where I would say, “don’t give up.” I definitely felt these moments in the lab, feeling sometimes like I was in the wrong field as I used up multiple pipette tip boxes just for my experiments to fail. As of the time I’m writing this essay, I’m reaching the end of my project, so I can only guess what it will feel like to finish. However, I will say that if you enjoy your field and the idea behind your project, then completing it will hopefully give great joy.
Hopefully, this experience has been valuable in uncovering some ways to launch your journey in research. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you start projects that you genuinely enjoy, as it will be much more fun than doing something simply because it looks impressive. If you think research isn’t for you, then that’s okay—keep exploring and you’ll find something that suits you better.
Thank you for reading.