Once I finished junior year, laziness was supposed to prevent me from doing any difficult work.  I had previously sworn never to associate myself with the evils of idleness, but after suffering through SATs, Advanced Placement Exams and three years of Stuyvesant, I wanted to embrace senioritis. However, my summer job stopped all my hopes of becoming a couch potato. My ambitious inner self had volunteered for a research project at Queens College.

Despite the stereotype of research being mental work, I had to do manual labor such as washing glassware, making chemical solutions and reorganizing the lab. All the experiments were excruciatingly repetitive with procedures like pipetting a chemical five times and checking the measurements every half hour. My summer internship was mundane and possibly drearier than other paying jobs.

It wasn’t until my mentor started me on an actual project that I began to appreciate the redeeming qualities of my job. He told me that the first step in my experiment would be to design primers for PCR, or polymerase chain reactions, which are used to create multiple copies of a particular DNA sequence. But he never told me how to make primers or what primers were. I researched on Wikipedia and other Internet sources, learned what the primers’ purpose and mechanisms were in the experiment, and successfully created them using computer programs. This free and independent learning was what my mentor expected from all of his students. I had found a different and better way of learning than the classroom-lecture style I had been accustomed to for the past 16 years.

Within a month, I had developed enough knowledge of the subject and some experience to make my own decisions concerning the project and the lab. For example, I had accidentally left a full flask of gel in the microwave for four minutes, instead of one minute. The cap exploded off and the molten gel spewed over the top. I stared at this unintentional but perfect representation of a volcanic eruption for a moment and cleaned the microwave before the gel hardened.  As he usually did with all my other mistakes, my mentor laughed and said, “Yeah, that can happen sometimes,” but followed with a mini lecture on safety.

Research became enjoyable as I became used to the working environment. Other lab members and I often helped each other by asking for and returning favors like storing Petri dishes with bacteria in refrigerators and guiding a lab member in a wheelchair through narrow walkways. Striking up conversations always proved to be worth the effort. Discovering that my mentor had been a political science major at Swarthmore College before stepping into research, that the graduate student in the adjacent lab was a young mother and that the quiet graduate student, Anna, enjoyed going to Mets games replaced my previous views on research and the people involved.

The responsibility I had was stressful because, unlike a school assignment, the results would be evaluated and used by the scientific community. However, as a senior who will toil through the brutal college application process, having some control over my job (or over anything) was comforting. I now know from experience that in the real world, I am defined not only by my grades, but by my genuine enthusiasm for my occupation and my relationships with the people at the workplace.

Most students believe that spending the summer sitting in a classroom will help prepare them for another rigorous school year. However, immersing oneself in real life experience such as jobs and volunteer work, even for two months, can help us distance ourselves from schoolwork. Work is therapeutic.