A Well Informed Day in the Lab by Najiyah

A Well Informed Day in the Lab by Najiyah - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Earlier in the year an experiment for testing enzymatic reactions had taken place in my AP Biology class. Independence is the main thing that is concentrated in an AP class, so we weren't being as regularly supervised as in regular classes. Our teacher prepared the lab, and left everything else up to us. Being that the success or failure of it was all depended on us and our efficiency, I toke this as my first real lab.
We were paired together in groups of two, it was a team effort, and if there was no cooperation there would be no success. Our purpose was to examine the rate of binding of a substrate to an enzyme in different environmental factors — the binding would become noticeable due to color change.

Our first step of the procedure was to mix the substrate solution with the enzyme solution into a test tube, let the tube rest for five minutes and record our findings. We noticed within the five minute time frame there was little to no change in color. But even within that frame, we became impatient around the second minute. We had the idea that the reaction would happen right away, otherwise we did something wrong; and that's where we went wrong. Repeatedly, we did this step over and over again, becoming frustrated, we were getting even less precise with our measurements. In that moment though, we didn't realize it but both those factors influenced the result of our lab. We were just so heavily concerned about an immediate reaction that we became careless. And it sort of lead to the lab becoming of a competition, since some of our classmates were getting a color change; this definitely provoked a determined effort.

Minutes before the bell rung for the next period, we gave our questions and feedback to our teacher. We explained to him that despite the number of times we reset the solutions, there was barely a color change. We also asked if he got a reaction from the test run he did prior to the set up, he told us "Absolutely, but not immediately." That in experiments there will sometimes be almost immediate reactions, in others there won't. We informed him about the two downfalls of our lab, so he also told us that having patience is a necessity, that we should always be accurate with our measurements and fully understand procedures before starting all tasks. Something that stuck, afterwards, was a statement he made based on me and my partner's career choices. He told us that if we were to administer a drug to a patient, and even just the slightest, we went over the assigned dosage and that caused a negative affect to the body, that we'd be out of a career.

We toke his comparison very seriously, and decided that'd we'd better apply all of what he told into future labs, not only in his class though, but in college too. And even in future procedures that we'll follow in our career paths. That day, even as simple as the advice was that he gave, we learned something that we'll soon incorporate into our careers. We even had a few labs afterwards, that turned out a complete success, due to our good cooperation, patience, and accuracy.