Name: Michelle Scuzzarella
Class Year: 2021
Major: Biology
Hometown: Lynn, Mass.
Internship Organization: Magee-Womens Research Institute, Yanowitz Lab
Job Title: Research Intern
Location: Pittsburgh, Pa. (remote)
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
The Yanowitz lab focuses on the field of reproductive biology and uses Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism to conduct this work. I’m currently working on a remote project involving the conservation of meiotic double-strand break proteins in the Caenorhabditis genus. A lot of my work has involved learning and using R, which is a programming language, to align amino acid sequences of orthologous genes from different Caenorhabditis species in order to find areas of conservation. I’m doing this work to try to understand the evolution of a somewhat poorly conserved but important family of genes.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied for this internship because I worked in the same lab last summer and I really enjoyed it! The work I did was really interesting, and the environment was perfect for academic and professional growth. On top of that, I gained two really great mentors last summer and I considered myself very lucky to get the chance to work with them again.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
Having to work remotely definitely changed up the plans for what I was going to be doing this summer. Originally, I was going to get a new project to learn about and practice more lab skills that I didn’t get to last summer, but when that ended up not being possible, my supervisor made sure I would still be gaining some valuable skills this summer. While there are programs and websites that can be used to align DNA and protein sequences, they’re not as customizable as needed for my project, so it was decided that it would be useful for me to learn how to use R. While I may not be an expert in R, I’ve learned that with the base I have now, there are so many things that I can do with this program, from creating graphics for scientific figures to doing statistical analyses. This skill is really important to me because it’s something I never thought I would be able to do considering how I’ve never been the best with technology. Learning R has given me a skill set that is totally different from anything else I’ve learned in the past and I think it could prove to be a useful tool in my professional life.
What is most rewarding about your internship?
The most rewarding thing about this internship is how it has impacted my future in so many different ways. One way is through the mentors I’ve gained and the connections I’ve made. My mentors have taught me so many different skills that I’ll actually need in my future and could be applicable to so many different things. Through this, they’ve helped me realize that I’m capable of doing things and succeeding in ways that I never really thought I would be able to do.Through the work I’ve done and guidance from my mentors, I’ve also gained a sense of what I want to do in the future, which is probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve gained over the past two summers working in the Yanowitz lab.
Visit the Summer 2020 Internships page to read more student stories.