I recently returned from one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. What initially caught my attention about this internship was that it was a 3 hour drive from Prague in the Czech Republic, where I had served my mission about a year and a half earlier. Spending the summer in Jena meant that I would get the opportunity to travel with my wife. I was thrilled at the opportunity to return to that part of the world, and eager to learn about about the emerging field of bioinformatics.
When I was accepted into the internship, I was absolutely thrilled. I would be receiving a monthly stipend, so that really helped in covering the cost. However, getting ready for the internship wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped. I was expecting more assistance from the department, but they really just left it up to my wife and I. So that turned out to be quite the learning experience! I decided to do it for credit hours, which is a decision that I highly recommend. I think that knowing that I was doing it all for credit helped me to work as hard as I could. Luckily the secretary at the institute was very helpful, especially in making sure my wife and I had a place to stay when we got there.
Waiting for the internship to finally come was tough, but eventually the day came! After a long plane ride and train ride, the secretary at the institute picked us up at the Jena train station and took us to our new home for the next three months. The next day I met with my advisor Shuqing, who was a post-doc that had been working there for 2 years. He was very understanding of the fact that I was a total beginner, and he made it clear that he was willing to offer as much help as I needed. I would be studying the genome of Nicotiana attenuata, or the tobacco plant. Studying tobacco as a BYU student is ironic, I know, but we were studying tobacco as a model organism to make observations about plants generally.
My work was challenging, but I was determined to be successful. Shuqing said that the amount of time we spent working at the institute was task-based, so the hours I worked were irrelevant as long as I got it done. I soon found out that the tasks I were given took up a LOT of time, and I found myself working about 9-11 hours a day. After the second week I was asked to present my hypothesis to the lab. I was nervous, but with Shuqing's help I was prepared and it went very well. 9-11 hours a week in front of a computer may not sound too thrilling to everyone. The other BYU students that worked in the wet lab teased me a bit for sitting in front of the computer all day. But what I was doing was totally engaging, and only on rare occasion did I feel that it was mundane. As I pressed forward with Shuqing's help, our results were really quite thrilling. We were able to understand transcriptome expression patterns from an evolutionary perspective using interesting new statistical methodologies. By the end of my stay, I had spent a good deal of time discussing my project with Ian, the director of the entire department. He showed a lot of confidence in me, and at the end of my internship he asked me to present my work to the entire department The work I did there will result in one, possibly two papers. I never expected it would go so well, but it did and I am very grateful for that.
In addition to the success I had as a researcher, it was the most fun I have ever had. On the weekends my wife and I would generally rent a car and go for a trip. We went to Prague 3 times, England, Southern Germany and Austria all on the weekends. At the end of our stay we took all the BYU students to Prague, which was really fun for me to do. My advisor Shuqing and I became good friends. We would go rock climbing together and he invited us to a barbecue. After the internship was over, my wife and I traveled Europe three weeks visiting Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, and France. I will never forget the memories that we made during this internship, and I will always look back on it as the beginning of my scientific career!
