NextGen Neuroscience Program: Academic Development

My time in DNET started in June 2021 when I began the NextGen Neuroscience program at Albany Med. The program's syllabus focuses on academic development, scientific development, and professional development. Therefore, to begin chronicling my time in DNET, I will start by reflecting on how I grew during the summer program in the 3 ways mentioned in the syllabus. In this post I will describe my academic development.

In the summer program, a significant amount of the lectures I attended focused on writing the parts of a scientific research paper. Prior to the start of this program, I had never even read a complete research paper from title to conclusion. Therefore, learning about writing these components was completely new to me. I learned how to draft all of the part of a research paper, such as the abstract, results, conclusion, etc. There was also a lecture on the basics of statistics, which really helped me break down the numbers-heavy results section of most research papers.

However, it was not enough to just learn about writing these parts. In the lab I was working in, I was assigned to a medical student and the project he was working on. I was able to practice the skills I was taught by drafting the introduction and methods of the paper he was working on. It was very interesting to learn how research papers get revised and reshaped over time, as it seemed like we went from version 1 to version 15 in no time! Everyone can read finished, polished articles on PubMed, but not everyone can see how they get rewritten and developed in the first stages. Throughout the 8-week program, I worked on two different papers, where I got to try writing other parts of the research paper, such as the discussion, abstract, etc.