Taking life step by step

This week I had the opportunity to interview Dr.Macias, a professor of the Biological Sciences Department at UNT. From our meeting, I was hoping to gain knowledge on creating a grant NIH proposal, as she had just completed one a week before our interview. Since I’m doing my original work on creating a mock NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant proposal that details the steps in the process and logistics behind an experiment about reversing epigenetic silencing to treat diseases, I have another perspective on the insights of the best way to go about creating my proposal. One of the most important things I took away from this interview was that one of the most difficult aspects of the career and just studying for this profession can be unnecessarily comparing yourself to your peers. She felt that it was extremely competitive and said that it is easy to feel like you're not good enough, but remembering everyone learns differently and giving your hundred percent in all the work I do can allow me to overcome this. When we were discussing why we had a passion for biomedical research, Dr. Macias brought up an interesting point I never considered. She said that the reason she loves this field is that she can research with a lot of freedom and flexibility while being able to gain knowledge that hasn’t even been discovered yet. Researchers such as her can find answers to questions humanity may have on the scientific world and being able to create trials to test theories about undiscovered things is like a job of no other.