I finished my summer research and went back to NYC this past week. On my last day, I gave a presentation to my lab to share and summarize my work this summer. I feel preparing for this talk was a very meaningful experience for me, since it allowed me to wrap up everything I had worked on and tell it as a scientific story—from the questions we asked, to the strategies we used to address them, to the answers we found. It was both a challenge and a rewarding opportunity to think carefully about how to present my work in a way that was clear, rigorous, and interesting to others.
During my past two years at Barnard, after taking several courses on human evolution and bioanthropology and working in an evolutionary genetics lab, I was eager to approach human evolution from a more biological perspective, or the genetics perspective more specifically. This summer marked my first true step into the field of human evolutionary genetics and made me realize that this is exactly the direction I want to pursue in the future. Back to school, I will continue working on human brain evolution with Dr. Polleux for my senior thesis, and the skills and insights I gained this summer have laid a strong foundation for that work.
Looking back, this was a truly fruitful summer for me. I learned many cell culture techniques and computational analysis. But more importantly, I learned more about how to think like a scientist by the precious opportunity of working day by day with my PI. Experiments often came with many ups and downs, took longer than expected, and involved many unexpected barriers. I felt very disappointed with these unexpected challenges at first, but over time, I learned to approach these challenges with determination and to treat failures as valuable lessons. Another important takeaway was to remain skeptical: scientific findings, no matter how famous or authoritative, can still be wrong. A good scientist never simply accepts or trusts something, but always questions, tests, and verifies.
- MELODY XU '26