My Most Memorable Co-op Experience

Written by Jeffrey Marchioni, a fourth year Bioengineering student.

About

Jeffrey Marchioni is a fourth year Bioengineering student with an Environmental Science Major. He is currently on his third and final co-op at Compass Therapeutics exploring antibody biology and autoimmune disease systems. He reflects on his most memorable experiences on his previous co-op at Anne-Laure Papa (ALP) Lab at GWU.

My Most Memorable Co-op Experience

Dr. Anne-Laure Papa hired me and another co-op to begin her new lab in the BioE department at GWU. The focus was creating a diagnostic probe to detect tumor metastasis and thrombosis. It was a memorable experience specifically because the lab was new, and the other co-op and I were responsible for every aspect of its beginning. We conducted literature review, protocol development, assay optimization, data analysis, and reporting of our final results. We saw an entire project from start to almost-finish and could see the value in the work we completed.

While the experience was incredible, it also was very tough at times. Learning experimental design and tweaking assays were long and tedious processes that required high precision and attention to detail. Some days we had to work much longer as well to ensure our experiment’s success. In addition, because this research had not been completed before, we had many troubleshooting errors only able to be learned through experience.

Overall, I felt I achieved a lot during this co-op from a learning viewpoint as well as a professional viewpoint when it comes to scientific research.

Related Departments:Bioengineering