Student profile - Khyati Sudhir Dalal
Why did you choose to do the Research Skills Summer School?
I already had some lab experience but I wanted to increase my confidence in the lab before starting my Masters. Also the course gave me the opportunity to undertake techniques that I hadn’t used before.
What were the highlights and biggest challenges of the course?
When you are doing the course you are left in an open field of knowledge, the course is all about understanding the ‘why’ of science, why do you do the experiment in a particular way, why you use a particular reagent or use a certain database to look up information. As you are not being formally assessed you can accumulate knowledge without worrying about how you will write a 3000-word essay on it.
As well as this I felt like I had a head start in terms of choosing my projects for my Masters, I got the opportunity to meet academics, and find out about their areas of interest, and get ideas about who I might want to work with for my first project.
“The course was intensive and challenging but fun!”
In terms of challenges, the course was 9-5 every day and it was very intensive. At the start I was struggling to manage my experiments so that I had enough time to have breaks and go for lunch but by the end I had a lot of practice so my time management was greatly improved.
There was also a lot of information given in each day, which we had to take in and understand quickly as we would be moving on to a new technique or new part of the protocol the next day.
The course was intensive and challenging but fun!
How has the course prepared you for your Masters?
The Summer School set me off to a good start in my first Masters project.
My confidence in the lab has really improved. Also as I was accustomed to working 9-5 in the summer I was prepared for how much work I would need to put in and how many hours I would need to give to my research project.
I have used many of the techniques that I learnt in the Summer School and I am sure I will be using the other techniques in the future on other projects.
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