They are committed, diligent, and unwavering. They cannot fathom being fickle; they are tenacious enough to devote years of their life to one idea, skill, mechanism, or thesis without question. They are people whose drive feels physiological, as if it keeps their heart pumping blood through their arteries, into their veins, and back again - circulating purpose through their entire body. I grew up watching this kind of discipline take shape every day in my home. My dad, “doctor” to most, wakes up at the same time each day, buttons his shirt, knots his tie, pours a cup of coffee, grabs a red apple, and heads to work. Before I left for elementary school each day, he would lean down and say, “see you later, alligator.” “In a while crocodile,” I would reply. At the time, it was simply a routine. Now, I understand it as something more: consistency as devotion, habit as an expression of care. Even now, on mornings when I have an exam, I wake up to a text from him that says the same thing, “see you later, alligator,” because care shows up through repetition. Regardless of what else is happening in the world, that focused ambition, the kind that shows up every day, anchors a life in healthcare.

 

The story that is going to unfold is one that examines patient care with curiosity, ambition, and compassion. It was the fall of 2023. I joined the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and dreamed of having the opportunity to work in a lab. It simply did not matter to me if I would be labelling vials or organizing spreadsheets - I just wanted to physically be in a lab, surrounded by knowledge, learning about impactful work in progress. We were instructed in our UROP course to send hundreds of emails with our CV to as many labs as we could. For a couple weeks, approximately 90% of my emails were met with no response while the other 10% were met with “sorry, we picked someone else but good luck!” Finally, I received a couple of positive email responses and interviewed at a couple of labs. Before I knew it, my first day of working in a lab had arrived. 

 

I waited at the Central Campus Transit Center with all of the engineering students and squished on the first bus that arrived. I entered a Michigan Medicine building and nervously scoured the building for 20 minutes until I found the lab. When I took a deep breath and entered the lab, my mentor was waiting for me and she started giving me a tour. The black work benches were juxtaposed with the completely white walls, with shelves of every size micropipette tip you could imagine. She pointed at a closet filled with white lab coats and explained I would wear one of those. I observed everyone working in the lab, moving around their desks and work benches. The most jarring thing I noticed was the utter silence, interrupted only by a hushed whisper or the whir of a centrifuge. 

 

Then my mentor turned to a whiteboard and started telling me about the research. The work focused on identifying tumor viral DNA in blood and urine, particularly in HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers, sometimes months before tumors appeared on imaging. The implications were profound: earlier intervention, less invasive monitoring, and more equitable access to care. I was immediately struck by the passion behind the work. By hearing my mentor speak not about the samples, but about the people behind them, the anxiety of cancer recurrence, and the possibility that a blood test could completely alter a patient’s timeline. I did not know it yet but balancing the precision of lab work with the humanity behind each sample has been one of the clearest ways I have learned to practice science with care. 

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Then my mentor turned to me and said, “Okay, now I am going to evaluate you.” My heart dropped as she handed me a micropipette and asked me to transfer specific volumes of water from one vial to another. I gripped the micropipette tightly in my left hand and firmly pushed a plastic tip onto the end. “Oh, you’re a lefty,” she said. “Yes,” I replied, suddenly self-conscious. I took a breath and focused. Holding the pipette completely vertical, careful not to touch the walls of the tube, I pressed my thumb to the first stop. I lowered the tip into the liquid without letting it graze the sides or bottom of the tube and released my thumb upwards as slowly as I could, allowing the spring to draw liquid up. I knew that aspirating liquid too quickly could cause air bubbles, sample loss, splashing, or damage to the micropipette shaft, and I refused to let there be any doubt about the care I would take with a cancer patient’s blood sample. Then I moved my tip to the other vial and pushed my thumb all the way down to eject the liquid. I tried to keep my movements deliberate and composed, even though my pulse was racing. I repeated the process a couple of times with different microliter volumes, and then paused waiting for her next instruction. She smiled, “I’m happy. You’re going to be doing your own DNA isolations by next week.” I was stunned. I left that day feeling grateful, inspired, and eager to begin. 

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The following week, she trained me. It felt strange to stand beside her for four hours, moving step by step through the protocol together. We performed each step side by side. Her movements were precise - measured, exact, effortless to my eye. Every time my technique wasn’t as controlled as hers, every time my hands hesitated or adjusted mid-motion, a thought crept in: What am I doing here?

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The first thing I noticed was how different blood felt from water. Its viscosity carried weight and I could feel the resistance through my micropipette. Suddenly, this wasn’t practice. I had to distinguish plasma from whole blood, track volumes carefully, and move samples from two tubes to eight to sixteen, each step separating, isolating, refining. It was no longer transferring water between vials, it was processing something real. 

 

Training beside her felt like playing a high-stakes game of Operation, where the buzzer sounded every time you slipped. “Watch the plasma,” she would say. “Look at its shape. Its volume. Watch your tip enter the sample. Don’t touch the sides of the tube.” If my pipette brushed the wall of the tube, the bottom, the table, even my lab coat, I would hear the buzzer, “contaminated.” I changed the tip more times than I could count that day. We changed gloves constantly too, if you set a timer on your phone or touched anything outside the field, you needed new gloves. That was one of the strangest adjustments: the hyperawareness that every single particle could matter.

 

I was also learning the names of unfamiliar buffers and their functions - lysis, binding, washing, eluting - while the centrifuge spun beside us, separating samples by density. Everything felt new and technical. The moments that steadied me most were when she said, “Be careful not to spill that, I’ve done that countless times” or “I’ve made that mistake before.” In those moments, I remembered we were striving for precision yet we were human. Our goal was to recognize mistakes and correct them, not to avoid them completely. 

 

After training, I began isolating DNA from blood samples on my own and I was proud to have that responsibility. On my first day working independently, I spent the full four hours moving deliberately, following every volume and instruction in the protocol exactly. I remember thinking about how, in baking, someone might say, “It’s not a science - just add a pinch.” But this was a science. These were real samples from real patients and this work could have significant impacts on cancer research. At the end of that first day, I placed my samples in the freezer and walked out feeling accomplished. The next time I came into the lab, my mentor said, “Sydney, may I speak with you for a moment?” Her words struck deeper than she could have known. My mind spiraled instantly - Did I contaminate everything? Did I ruin the samples? Do they think I did something dishonest? Did I screw everything up?

 

She told me she could not perform genomic sequencing on my samples - I had done something wrong. She asked me if I knew what had happened. I did not. My mind searched frantically for a missed step, a contaminated tip, a misread volume, but I simply had no answer. What bothered me most was the thought that I had not cared enough to handle those samples in the most precise way possible. She said, “Okay. This time, follow the protocol exactly. Take note of every single thing you do.” I nodded. And I did exactly that. 

 

My hypervigilance rose to another level. I read the protocol twice before I even touched anything. I reread every volume before I even picked up the micropipette, then checked the setting on the pipette again before it entered a single sample. I documented every step, every movement was accounted for. I changed my gloves constantly, even after jotting down a note, so that particles from my pencil could not compromise a sample. Nothing was casual about my approach. 

 

To this day, I do not know what happened to those first samples. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is how I responded - how I built a system of precision so deliberate that the same mistake would never happen again in the two years that followed. When I told my friends that everyone in my lab worked in silence, they were surprised that no one listened to music. I interpreted the silence as a form of respect, a focus more intentional than the distracted half-attention that comes with blasting music in your AirPods. I respected the focus, the work, and the passion. Looking back, it was a privilege to work as a research assistant in Dr. Chad Brenner’s Otolaryngology and Translational Oncology lab in the Rogel Cancer Center. 

 

In the months that followed, my hands grew steadier. I learned how to see plasma the way my mentor did - its shape, color, and viscosity became familiar. I could anticipate the next step of my protocol before reading it. However, what changed most was not my technique, it was my understanding of what the samples meant. The work in the lab centered on cancer therapies for HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers. The oropharynx, located at the back of the mouth, is important for speech, breathing, and swallowing. I heard discussions in the lab about patients who were suddenly navigating radiation, feeding tubes, difficulty swallowing, and impaired speech. I began to actualize that my pipetting precision was not just about being technical. It was tied to whether someone might keep their ability to eat dinner with their family, speak clearly to their friends, or live without pain. These cancers do not just threaten survival but alter quality of life in intimate ways. 

 

Hearing the daily realities for patients whose lives had been uprooted sharpened me. Every time I held a micropipette over a vial of blood, I began to understand that this work was about protecting patients’ dignity. Our focused silence in the lab could ripple outward into someone else’s life. But that realization introduced another tension. Lab work is rarely perfect: data can be unclear and experiments fail. Even when protocols are followed precisely, results are not always clear. How do we reconcile the uncertainty of scientific work with the certainty of patient suffering? How do we honor the urgency of real lives while operating within a process that feels obscure at times?

 

Those questions led me to interview my professor, Dr. Stockbridge, a professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology whose lab studies fluoride resistance in oral bacteria. I expected her to emphasize technical mastery. And she did speak about rigor - about measuring data many times and following your evidence wherever it leads. Her lab investigates the molecular mechanisms that allow microbes to pump fluoride out of their cells. Understanding those mechanisms could one day address public concerns about fluoride exposure. 

 

What struck me most was how she described the balance between rigor and creativity. Good science, she said, requires both. Data must be collected meticulously and reproduced many times. Yet when something in that data cannot be explained by existing knowledge, that is where creativity enters. It's where you need to think outside the box, look at something from a different angle, or imagine mechanisms that have not yet been described. It’s where new hypotheses are born and how science advances. When I asked about the feeling of solving a protein structure in her lab, she explained that it brings both certainty and complexity. A structure illuminates what was once unclear but it also reveals new layers of intricacy. It becomes, in her words, a hypothesis generator.     

 

Dr. Stockbridge also spoke about scientific integrity - about following data rather than forcing conclusions, sharing discoveries with the science community, and mentoring students according to their interests rather than her own. And when I asked about ambition, she smiled and said ambition is healthy but it cannot come at the detriment of others. Scientists can be competitive, intense, and want to be the first to reach answers, but that ambition needs to be guided by generosity. Listening to her reframed my earlier tension. Excellence in science is not about achieving certainty, it's about pursuing truth rigorously while acknowledging complexity. It is about allowing ambition to be anchored in service.