During the first semester of my senior year, I began my honors project with Dr. Madhuri Manpadi. My objective was to perform assays in order to determine the free radical scavenging activity of American dogwood tree bark. This semester was trying because we needed standard readings to be able to accurately test our samples and it seemed like no matter what troubleshooting technique we tried, nothing gave us viable results. Without being able to properly perform standards of the assays, we were stuck. The plate pictured above was the first plate that ever gave us a visible result - that our assay was generating the radical and that the amount of radical changed based on the concentration of solution which was input. Successfully generating a standard reading for the assay was not the end of our problems, but it was the small victory that we needed to keep pushing forward and troubleshooting. This experience taught me that even when it seems like nothing is going right, the end goal may be closer than it seems and pushing forward is the only way to get there.
My senior honors project is one of the longest projects I have done to date. Although it was hard to continually have to think of ways to troubleshoot, I also learned a lot from the experience. I learned patience when assays took some time to work, perseverance when nothing worked, and joy when even the smallest things worked. Although I was not able to finish the project as I would have liked to, I gained vital experience in researching, executing, and writing up a project. I also gained the independence to seek out my own answers in the literature and suggest my own ideas. I hope to continue to use the lessons that I learned during my project.