MCB opens labs to high-school groups
Every fall, MCB welcomes high-school students and their teachers for a morning of lab tours and conversations with faculty, current students and advisers. This October, 122 high-school junios and seniors from nine schools in Tucson and Chandler, accompanied by 13 teachers, visited campus for the Meet MCB! open house.
Students made full use of the access: They asked in-depth questions about the methods and purpose of the research, identified cancer cells under a microscope and got hands-on with flour beetles. Zebrafish larvae, the newest addition to the MCB model organisms, were a big hit (photo left). Each group got to tour four different labs out of the eleven participating ones with a research focus ranging from breast cancer to ALS. The faculty members who run the labs – the PIs or in one student’s paraphrase, “the CEOs of the labs”) – talked about their research.
The participating students come from high schools with a dual enrollment program for MCB intro courses and therefore already have a high level of biology knowledge. They were able to ask undergraduate students during a student panel and lab tours about strategies to score a lab position (top tips: cold email PIs, read at least one of their papers, and include your CV) and even their sleep schedules.
There is a good chance some of the students will be back to U of A next year as freshmen. The first-hand campus experience has already proven convincing in a number of cases – several of today’s undergraduate tour guides fondly remember their own visit with Meet MCB! a few years prior. And for some high schoolers, the day was a big factor in choosing their major. Current MCB Junior Matthew Boylan: "I recall being anxious about university and one of my primary concerns was deciding which major I wanted to commit the next four years to. At the time I was an "undecided science" major, not sure which program would best fit my interests. The event was very affirming; the lab tours, student perspective, and friendly staff played a big role in leading me to commit to a Bachelor of Science in MCB and Biochemistry."
The event is hosted in collaboration with the BIOTECH Project.