Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics Internship

- Sebastian Caliri '08

DNA Microarray Platform

Running forty hours a week for six weeks in the summer, internships at the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG) certainly give you a taste of what a real biotech job is like. Seeing as it eats away a large chunk of your summer, students looking to participate should be serious about pursuing lab work, and have a good handle on topics in molecular biology. Selection is competitive and requires several essays, a transcript, a teacher recommendation, and an interview via phone. Difficulty is a mixed-bag. To do most of the procedures required of you, you will only need to learn how to use the various pieces of equipment, and then follow the operating procedures. Understanding what you’re doing is another story – you’ll also have to apply what you know to figure out how to handle, store, and mix various compounds depending on their properties. Additionally, when things go wrong (and, invariably, they do), it is important to know the science behind what you’re doing, to save yourself from wasting time or thousands of dollars worth of reagents and samples. In your six weeks you’ll be very busy with all kinds of lab work – as you start with individual pieces of the microarray procedure, eventually moving up to handling your own assays from start to finish. One word of warning is that you will not be doing research at the HPCGG. Researchers submit samples to the lab, and you run the tests they specify. It’s rewarding in its own way; plus you get to meet plenty of prominent scientists in the Boston / Cambridge area. All in all, the HPCGG provides a great, supportive environment to get a feel for what laboratory work is like.