"My name's Lydia Gramai, I'm a third year
PhD student at NYU school of medicine and
I'm enrolled through the Sackler program.
Any lab that you would walk in to here, the
research that they do matters for something.
People aren't just spending money and pipe
heading things for no reason.
Some people want to cure cancer, they wanna
cure Alzheimer's, or maybe they just want
to understand a particular pathway, which
is along the lines of what I do.
So the pathway that I'm studying may not seem
very important to people at first glance,
but it's a really important pathway in some
really important processes.
It's really important for stem cell development,
and it's a really important pathway in involved
in cancer progression.
I have aims, I have larger scale ideas that
I want to pursue in the lab, and I work really
closely with Doctor Bocklan in PI to kind
of develop those ideas and figure out which
experiments I want to do to answer those questions.
But in the day to day, a lot of the experiments
that I design and execute, I'm sort of, I
get to go that on my own.
I get to kind of map out what I'm gonna do
each day and How I'm gonna do it.
So I'll be working at the microscope for a
while dissecting or making microscope slides
to visualize my samples, so kind of just day
to day lab protocols that I'm executing.
My name is Michael Burel.
I'm a graduate student here at New York University
School of Medicine, and I'm from Atlanta,
Georgia.
So I kind of, in science, I guess you have
two obvious routes.
You can go to medical school, or you can do
research.
I chose research for two reasons.
One, because I'm squeamish, and two because
I like the idea of helping, or my work having
this rippling effect so that I can help potentially
millions of people with this one project I'm
doing.
In Erika Bach's lab, we focus on what's called
basic biology or fundamental biology.
We study the really simple basic processes
of how cells talk to each other.
My project in particular has implications
on understanding why some cancers, even after
chemo therapy, and after radiation, and after
patients spend countless dollars and other
intangible emotional trials that they have
to go through, the cancer comes back, and
it's even more aggressive.
So I'm interested in why is that happening
and how can we ensure that when we get rid
of cancer, we get rid of it.
My name is Alessandro Bailetti.
I'm a second year graduate student in the
developmental genetics department lab.
When I was a kid, for a long time I wanted
to be a system engineer.
Either 13 or 14 years later, and my teacher
taught us about the basic ATCG nucleotides
and how those 4 molecules make, I mean plus
other molecules, make the whole composition
of what we are, the genetic code.
And I'm like "Hold on.
So you're telling me that this is based on
4 specific codes, 4 nucleotides that become
a code?"
And I started thinking about how cool is that.
A lot of students don't go in to science because
they don't think they have Quality X or Quality
Y, and it's really easy to get discouraged
when you look around and you think that you
don't have what that person next to you has.
I think the ability to look past that and
to just do what you love is really a quality
I think you need to have.
And if you just find the passion and the thing
that makes you want to get up in the morning
and be like "I want to spend 12 hours of my
day doing this."
I know that sounds ridiculous, but you will
find it, whatever it is.
And if you find that and act on it, you'll
be smooth sailing.
The building blocks of science, of life, that
fact that I can understand that , or I'm trying
to understand that, for me is fascinating.
Remember where you are, remember that there
is so much other things going on around us
that we don't have a chance to change.
But one thing that we can control is what
we do, and if you do that, if you do what
you love to do, then the sky's the limit."
