GRIP, Research Abroad Summer Research Experience Abroad in Aachen

GRIP: Engineering Research in Aachen, Germany

My engineering research internship in Aachen, Germany was at a biomaterials lab at Uniklinik, the university’s hospital, alongside four other interns (two also from Penn Bioengineering!) in the RWTH University’s summer program (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)). Together, we interns are often called the UROPs and we come from various universities in the US and Canada. Even though we worked in the same lab, we had completely different research project topics related to 3D bioprinting and bioengineering. We still worked together in the same student office every day, studying scientific literature when we were not performing experiments in the lab, figuring out why our code wouldn’t work, or chatting about our college lives back home during our snack breaks. We also go on our daily Mensa trips where we walk ten minutes to the dining hall as a lab to have lunch together. I really love being surrounded by my lab community

because even when we are not in the lab, we still have lab outings such as hiking and grabbing ice cream after, participating in the university’s sports day, and celebrating the Fourth of July with a BBQ picnic at the park. It was really great to know each other more throughout our time spent together and we grew very close to each other over time that I look forward to our lively work environment every day.

For the first time, I got to conduct research in the field of bone tissue engineering so I haven’t been exposed to a lot of the experimental techniques and background studies of my research. Yet over the course of my internship, I have deeply enjoyed learning a plethora of techniques and concepts in the lab such as microextrusion with 3D bioprinting, hydrogel characterization with rheology, crosslinking mechanisms of proteins from in-depth literature reviews, and statistical data analyses and presentation. Throughout my internship, I have grown to appreciate the process of exploring the unknown where we have to work on experiments no one has ever done before or with no specific protocols to follow. I learned that the first experiment always fails which in turn prompts me to consult the literature again and discuss with my lab mentors and colleagues alternative ways to improve the experimental methods used to test our hypotheses. Anything is worth a try at this point because you never know what can happen. Going through these setbacks makes research extremely rewarding when our experiments work in the end, leading us to continue performing all the different kinds of experiments possible. Whether it’s learning how to use various machines in the lab for the first time or listening to spontaneous science lessons from my mentor, every day in the lab is an opportunity to learn something new that I will carry with me for the rest of my scientific research journey.
 

After 10 weeks of work in the lab (which went by unbelievably fast in my opinion), my internship culminated in a final project report, poster, and presentation at the UROP Symposium. Stepping outside my comfort zone, I gave a 15 minute presentation of my research to a large audience of interns, mentors, and the general public. As nerve-wracking as it can be, I had the support of my mentor, fellow lab colleagues and interns so I remained enthusiastic and confident to share my research with everyone. It was also very exciting to see everyone else’s final work in various engineering fields from chemical engineering in the textile industry to developing AI models for mental disorders just to name a few. While the symposium opened up many new insights in different technical fields for me, it was the one-on-one interactions I had with other interns and the general public during my poster presentations that I found to be even more enlightening, where I got to explain parts of my research topic in detail and hear what others thought of it or clarify any questions they may have.

Overall, I am extremely grateful to my mentor and other colleagues in the lab for teaching me many valuable research skills and making our work environment feel more like a community than just a lab. I hope to grow from these cumulative research experiences in tissue engineering and 3D bioprinting and apply what I have learned in the field in my future academic research endeavors at Penn and beyond. This has been one of the most memorable summers of my life and it wouldn’t have been possible without everyone I met in Aachen as well as the generous support from Penn (the GRIP Program) and RWTH Aachen University. I don’t know when in my life I would have an opportunity like this again so I highly recommend going abroad during your undergraduate years, not just to gain new experiences in your field of interest and explore a foreign country’s cultures, but to also meet like-minded peers from all over the world who you can work together with and have loads of fun.