Most of my research positions were from Northeastern’s co-op program, which gives students a full-time professional work experience. I did two six-month co-ops during the fall semesters of my junior and senior years. It gave me a lot of exposure and helped me figure out what I liked and didn’t like.

My first co-op focused on imaging and it involved some mouse work—not a fan of mouse work! But I also learned how important and useful it can be. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do full-time, and that was okay. My second co-op was at a small biotech company working in immuno-oncology, and that experience is what sparked my interest in immuno-oncology. The entire company was only about thirty people, so I got to do a wide variety of tasks and learned a lot.

While I wasn’t officially part of any lab during the semesters, my senior capstone project collaborated with a lab and involved work with Caenorhabditis elegans (a type of microscopic worm) and CRISPR (gene editing technology), which was really exciting. My project was also part computational, so I got to explore the overlap between wet lab and computational research.