My Biggest Aha Moment

The biggest Aha moment for me during my externship so far was how many basic high school skills and facts combine to make the current cutting edge technology.  In the lab I am working in, the only process skills that are needed are standard chemistry math skills.  In the other NC state lab, math plus basic immune response knowledge is used.  In the Chapel Hill lab, all of the advanced skills are in the robotics portion of the lab and the concepts are reading DNA, replicating DNA, and matching it to a bank of know genes.  It makes the entire project much more assessable to the stake holders of the project knowing that all the big ideas in all three labs can be broken down into easily explainable terms!