ResearcHStart

[MUSIC PLAYING] I was in the very first research start class in 2015 here at the University of Chicago, and since then, I've acted as a peer mentor for students in the program each summer. As the hub of a group of local universities on the cutting edge of cancer research, the University of Chicago takes the initiative to expose the particular strengths of each institution's cancer research programs to gifted local students. We started with maybe seven or eight students and had a couple of different universities we wanted to include. So it was University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Illinois Chicago, and then eventually brought in Northwestern. ResearcHStart is a cancer research training program that's designed for high school students. It's a one year program, so students come to us for eight weeks in the summer. And the main component and most important component of this program is this intensive research experience. Being able to actually experience what research is like, have the day-to-day work of being in a lab, learning how to interact with your lab mates, how to present your work made it really clear that I was on the right track and that this is what I wanted to do. We try to complement that research experience with a number of career development and skill building, workshops, and opportunities. The one non-lab skill I took away the most from was the ability to network. It teaches you how to meet with professionals, how to connect with them, how to email a professor. If I really like a professor's work, how do I let them know that? How do I let them know I'm may be interested in working for them? Increasingly as ResearcHStart has developed, we've been trying to educate our communities about the advances in cancer research that are going on across our four institutions, and using specific examples from the research that they've been doing in the summer. The return is in the heart. And when you see these kids go through this and talk about it, their experience, and talk to their families, to me that that's what it's all about. To have this experience, where she actually spent eight weeks, 40 hours every week in research, really ignited a passion in her, which she has now continued, and I don't know that she would have known that was the right path for her until she actually was able to have this kind of experience. So to see them go through and tackle problem after problem and overcome hurdle after hurdle as they learn new things and learn to develop confidence in themselves is really amazing. So to hear them speak about their work and about research at the beginning of the program and at the end of the program is like night and day. It's remarkable to see how sophisticated and confident they become in just a few weeks. Before ResearcHStart, the biggest issue I had was like a math problem, and there's always a simple answer to that. Whereas in research and in life, there's not always a simple answer to the problem that you're addressing. Your research is going to take you in paths that you don't expect, and so ResearcHStart really taught me how to deal with the challenges that are thrown at you in research, and how to address them, and how to move past them, how to develop more questions from almost nothing. [MUSIC PLAYING]