Day: December 2, 2024

During your time at Georgia Tech, as a STEM major, one of the things that you might choose to do is to TA a class. TAing a class can be extremely rewarding, despite being a lot of work and it can teach you a lot of concepts that you may not have understood when you took a class. It can also teach you how to communicate your understanding, and the insights that you have taken away/obtained from going through a specific class can also enable you to adapt to new and innovative ways of thinking about and solving a problem, based on the input that you obtain from other individuals. You may or may not TA during your time at Georgia Tech. However, just in case you do, I would like to provide my insight TAing for a core STEM class in my BME curriculum to provide insight into how I felt, what I learned about TA/teacher – student interaction, and how to make the most out of the experience. I am hoping that this inspires more people to become TAs for STEM classes, or just to understand how being a STEM TA is from a former STEM TA’s perspective.

Last year, specifically, I was a TA for an Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Design class. A lot of people have asked me what that experience was like, and what I learned and what kind of growth I experienced as a result, both personally and professionally. Thus, I would like to share some key takeaways and insights that I have gained and how I felt doing this TA job, as someone who had never previously done it before.

I was excited and nervous, as I surveyed the room around me. It was my first day as a BMED 2310 TA in Spring 2023 and a TA, in general, and I had no idea what to expect. I walked into a class full of unknown people, and it only became more daunting as it went from there. It was the first day of class, and everyone was staring at their phones, almost in boredom and a complete lack of interest in being there. We were beginning to do ice-breakers, and everyone was asked to name a fun fact about themselves, and the origins of their name. I was never a person who liked icebreakers. For a long time, I found them pointless, and talking comfortably in front of strangers was not my jam. However, I was here in this situation. I could not just not participate in an icebreaker. So, I told the students my name, and the origin of it, and tried to crack a joke and tell something funny about myself. However, I was just faced with blank stares. I did not know if I was just awkward, or if the students were not interested in what I had to say. Regardless, it was daunting, but I tried not to get discouraged. After all, it was just my first day. Leaving class, I tried to have more hope for the next day, but I was not sure that anything was going to improve.

Walking into class the next day, I tried to be more optimistic. Maybe the kids were just tired. Maybe they did not like the class, or maybe they did not like other classes they were taking this semester. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. So, I went ahead and started explaining the lesson plan for the second day. I explained to them how their lab notebooks should look, and what type of information was expected to be seen in that notebook. I also introduced them to their Fusion Assignment and explained what they should look into, and how they should seek help if they needed it. However, students still looked uninterested and were extremely quiet. Later on in the class, as students were working on their Fusion Assignments, one of them asked me a Fusion-related question. They were having trouble with a certain step involved in the conversion between the 2D schematic and the 3D creation of the structure, and they wanted my advice as to how I could help them. I told them that I unfortunately did not know the answer, as my Fusion skills were rusty, and I needed a refresher on it. I asked the other TA’s if they could help more effectively. The students looked at me in an annoyed manner, and I just felt more out of place. Why had I chosen to TA this class? Why did students think that I was such an ineffective TA if they did? How could I become a better TA? It was then that I thought of trying something else.

I decided that during the next class, I was not going to try to act like a professor or a person of higher authority. Rather, I was going to act more as a friend of the students. I was going to be more open, and try to be more relatable. From then on, during every class, I would ask the students how they were doing, how their semester was going and how their classes that semester were going, and what I could do to help them. From then on, I found that they slowly became more open and began to come out of their shells more. Suddenly, they were much more engaged in class and much more engaged in what I was saying, and I was still not necessarily able to explain everything nor did I know everything. However, things were generally off on a better track.

So, what were my key takeaways from this experience you ask? One of the largest takeaways was that one of the most rewarding parts of being a BME TA is the potential that you get to see, as to what students can innovate and create, and how the ideas that students have shape up into larger prototypes and physical and computational models. Another key takeaway was that BME design classes help prepare students for greater and larger challenges, ahead in industry and in the workplace, and being a TA is important as you can guide students through these experiences and help push them to take on new challenges, and push the envelope on the tasks that they pursue. TAing this class also deepened my understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of concepts, and how they all tie together to ultimately solve problems/issues. For example, when I talked to a group that was doing a Laparscopic surgery project, they told me how the physics of the Laparascopic stapler and the material properties behind the Laparoscopic staples tied into their decisions about how they designed the stapler and what parts they ultimately chose to utilize and what method they used to create it. This was really a eureka moment for me because I had done a project on improving Laprascopic surgery, but I had only looked at it from the vantage point of Biology and Biomedical Engineering. I had not done deep introspection into how multiple concepts could tie into the success of this Laparoscopic stapler. This was widely insightful for me, and it really got me to consider how multiple areas of science could converge and intersect to ultimately solve poorly-defined, and complicated problems.

Part of the reward of being a Biomedical Engineer is the opportunity to explore fascinating and cutting-edge work that teaches me new skills and exposes me to unique challenges every semester. Throughout my journey, I’ve learned coding, worked with circuits, conducted detailed statistical analyses, and performed rigorous statistical tests. However, this semester, I had the chance to do something I had never experienced before. I worked with cancer cells. Yes, you read that right! I worked with cancer cells in a wet lab environment!

What is a wet lab, you ask? It’s a controlled environment where you work with potentially hazardous cell cultures and substances while following strict safety protocols, such as wearing gloves, goggles, lab coats, and disinfecting surfaces with ethanol to avoid contamination. Mistakes can introduce bacteria or other pathogens that could destroy your cultures, making careful adherence to procedure critical. Despite the challenges, working in a wet lab is an incredibly rewarding experience that not everyone gets to have. To share this unique experience, I want to provide some insight into what a typical experiment looks like in a wet lab, so those who haven’t had the opportunity can get a feel for it. Trust me, you’ll find it fascinating!

One of the experiments I conducted this semester involved treating Glioblastoma (U87-EGFP) cells with varying concentrations of Nickel Sulfate (NiSO₄) to assess its effects on cell viability. Intuitively, I hypothesized that increasing concentrations of Nickel Sulfate would be progressively toxic to these cells. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The coolest part? I didn’t even need to run complex calculations to see the effects! By observing the cells under a microscope, I could identify the toxicity based on changes in cell morphology and network structure. Let me explain how this works.

When cancer cells are healthy, they exhibit a spherical shape and form densely interconnected networks, similar to what we see in normal, healthy cells. However, as cells are damaged, these networks weaken, and their shapes become less defined and less spherical. These morphological changes occur because interactions between the cells’ mitochondria and cytoskeleton are disrupted. Observing these changes during the experiment allowed me to visually interpret the effects of Nickel Sulfate on the cells. Below, I’ve described and analyzed the experiment’s results to demonstrate how the process unfolded in real time.

Figure 1A. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 0 mM of NiSO4. Cells appear to be healthy, as they are exhibiting a bright color, are elongated in shape, and are forming an interconnected network like structure.

Figure 1B. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 0.0625 mM of NiSO4. Cells still appear to behealthy, but they are slightly less elongated, and are slightly less bright in color, as compared to when 0 mM ofNiSO4 was added. The cells do still appear to be interconnected, though.

Figure 1C. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 0.125 mM of NiSO4. Cells appear to be less healthy, and are significantly less elongated and bright, compared to when 0 or 0.0625 mM of NiSO4 wasadded. Cells also appear to be significantly less interconnected, as the network structure is weakening. The addition of NiSO4 at this concentration seems to be having a significant impact on the structure of NiSO4, indicating that the IC50 concentration is being approached.

Figure 1D. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 0.25 mM of NiSO4. Cells appear to be significantly less healthy, and there is hardly any presence of elongation, compared to when 0, 0.0625, or even0.125 mM of NiSO4 was added. There also appears to be hardly any network structure left between the cells, as all interconnections are not visible. The cells are also significantly less bright, and are extremely dim. The significant structural changes that arise from the addition of this concentration of NiSO4 indicate that the IC50 concentration has been passed.

Figure 1E. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 0.50 mM of NiSO4. Cells appear to be significantly less healthy, and do not have any visible interconnected network structure. Any slight presence of anetwork structure seen when 0.25 mM of NiSO4 was added also appears to be gone. Now, there appears to be no network structure.

Figure 1F. Appearance of U87 – EGFP cells, after addition of 1 mM of NiSO4. Cells appear to be significantly less healthy, as there is no elongation present. There is also no network structure left between the cells. No interconnections appear to be visible. The cells are in a completely opposite state to how they were, from a color perspective, when they were treated with no NiSO4. Given the permanent changes in structure and morphology of the cells, it is likely that the addition of 1 mM NiSO4 has the maximum possible impact on the cells. In other words, it is likely adding any more NiSO4 will have a marginal impact, if any.

Overall, observing these morphological changes was an eye-opening experience for me as it taught me to analyze cellular changes, in a relatively simple way, without relying on quantiative measurements or complicated formulas, something that I never knew that you could do as an Engineer! It also taught me that cancer is not as invincible as it is made out to be and it can indeed be quashed. This is something that I never knew until I did this experiment, and it gave me a lot of hope for the future of cancer treatment!

Reading this post, I hope you got inspiration to work in a Wet lab too one day as you see all the cool stuff that you can do/accomplish. Sometimes, you do not have to be a fancy scientist at the NIH or the CDC to make a difference. Occasionally, just the Georgia Tech student can accomplish some pretty cool stuff!