During the most recent panel review I saw a lot of really fantastic proposals. Most of the proposals were really thought out and clear and obviously had a lot of work put into it. One thing I realized was that the panel review process is very meticulous. My group and I reviewed every sentence of every proposal. We wanted to make sure that it met all of the criteria and constantly discussed how it would impact the respective fields. I think this influenced me the most because while we were pretty tough in analyzing everyone’s paper, the process of reading about all of these different topics was so fun! I think that doing research can be extremely draining but seeing the amount of effort and care that students put into their proposal was really inspiring. It makes me want to work much harder. I was also amazed by the amount of detail that some students put into their paper. While my paper was detailed, I think I may have missed a few key aspects of my proposal that would have definitely made it better. My experimentation process was solid but I did not have enough information in my intro about the potential health impacts of my topic. In the past, I have also noticed that my intro for proposals are somewhat lacking so I will definitely take this common mistake and try to remedy it in the future. When it comes to experimental design, I am pretty confident in my abilities. Quantifying microbes and sampling are some of my strengths and I am equipped to make experimental designs around these aspects of research. I think that something I could always improve upon is making sure that I cover all confounding variables that could possibly occur in the experimenting process.
