Over the past year, I have participated in a DIS project with Dr. Kiser and an internship. The DIS project focused on measuring nose and throat carriage rates for Staphylococcus aureus in undergraduate nursing students at UNCW. It was a collaborative effort with others participating in the same project as myself. With the accomplishments from the past year, I was able to travel to a couple conferences: the CAA Undergradaute Research Conference and the American Society for Microbiology General Meeting. As an intern, I worked as a pharmacy technician where I learned the fundamentals of a pharmacy. I completed this applied learning experience to see if working in a pharmacy either as a pharmacist or technician would be a potential career path.
I became involved in Dr. Kiser's lab by showing interest in learning more about microbiology and gaining lab experience in general. Originally, coming into the lab experience, I did not expect to be travelling to research conferences and liking it as much as I did, but it certainly was a pleasant surprise. I found the pharmacy internship by contacting a small pharmacy in which the owner was more than willing to let me try it out, just as she did when she was trying to find a career path that fit her best. From this experience I hoped to decide if working in that environment was something I would like to do as a career after graduating.
Having the research experience will make me a competitive candidate for applying to graduate school and could potentially lead into a subject that I would like to study further. Having lab certain techniques may be appealing to future employers depending on the job applied to.
