Undergraduate Research Experience 

As an undergraduate student, choosing an outstanding supervisor with an interesting research project is one of the more difficult challenges that you face during your undergraduate journey.

Choose a supervisor and research project

In my degree program as an undergraduate student, I had a GPA module named "Graduation Thesis (BIO4075)" that could be contributed to 10 credits from a total of 138 GPA credits. First, we choose a major to carry out our research project by the end of semester 5. I believe that this is the most challenging turning point to select the major and make contact with the supervisor. Considering my situation in choosing a major, first I gave priority to the most interesting major to me, molecular biology, but unfortunately, I lost my interview with the professor due to unexpected incidents. Then, I had a huge passion to focus on cancer biology, but I didn’t have a clear idea which lab was most suitable for that. After deep discussion with some lecturers and my fellow colleagues, I made contact with the Department of Physiology and Human Biology: Laboratory of Proteomics and Structural Biology, following my major in human biology.

After selecting a research laboratory, we need to contact supervisors to obtain lists of research projects that are overseen by the main supervisors in the lab. And this research project selection is really outstanding; it was able to choose a topic that is categorized under their supervisor's name according to his or her preference. Furthermore, students had the freedom to choose their research project and discuss it with a lecturer who was their supervisor. My research project was about the "Expression level of long non-coding RNA UCA1 in the tissues of patients with non-small cell lung cancer," and my supervisors were Dr. Nguyen Thi Tu Linh, and the Head of the Laboratory of Proteomics and Structural Biology, Assoc. Prof. Trinh Hong Thai. I would like to offer sincere gratitude to them for accepting me into their laboratory as an international student, inspiring me in human biology, and giving me guidance and dedicated instruction from the commencement of my research journey.

The research project consisted of two main research objectives.

1. We examined the preliminary data on the level of LncRNA expression in tissue samples that were collected from Vietnamese patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
2. Investigate the relationships between the expression of LncRNA UCA1 in tissues of patients with non-small cell lung cancer and some pathological characteristics of the diseases.

Specifically, this research project was designed to increase the understanding of long non-coding RNA and its roles in lung cancer.

Challenges of doing a research project 

Doing a research project as an undergraduate or postgraduate student is difficult because it entails a lengthy learning and research cycle. Not only that, you have to devote considerable effort and time to gain outstanding achievements at the end. Patience, in particular, is an important quality to cultivate while working on your own research project. While doing research, we cannot always get the expected results; it may be a log of failures or negative results. It’s a real situation that you have to face while doing research. In my case, I made a lot of mistakes during the research studies and learned many things as a result and I had great support from my supervisors, lab assistant, and fellow peers.

There is a lot of chalk that you have to face while planning your research and determining the stages of the research. Because it is time-consuming, and you must devote more attention to designing experiments than to other stages, Your whole project would depend on the experiment design, and you must make an effort to reduce human error during the research project. Then you collect the exact chemical instruments that best match your experiment. Also, I experienced long delays in the arrival of some sample-determined kits from the fort companies. 

But don’t be stressed! Go smoothly! 

The most interesting thing in my laboratory is that we had a huge responsibility to submit an experiment report daily after finishing the experiment. I firmly believe that it was a success for all projects in our laboratory, and it was a great opportunity to recorrect our mistakes and redesign the experiment for the next day. That’s why I really appreciate my supervisors who have dedicated their time to daily supervision and identified whether there is a significant improvement or not. Apart from that, when I suffered from some specific research issues, I posted questions on ResearchGate to solve them and followed up with some research articles to identify the exact problems.

Making close contact with your experienced supervisors, lab technician, and peers is essential for apprentices like us to reach the final destination.

Author: Nimalsha Hansani| nim_niii