Networking

Networking has been a hard one for me, truth be told. I knew and expected to speak to strangers once I started working but did not realize how helpful networking is during the college years. For the majority of my college years, I have spent my semesters quietly studying by myself or in groups but not really speaking to professors much. But now in my senior year, I do wish I had done more networking with professors and mentors. These wonderful people are full of knowledge about internships and pathways to achieve what you want to acomplish. If I could give a small piece of advice to anyone coming into college, I would tell them to get a mentor right away. It was hard for me to get a mentor because I wasn't sure of what I wanted to do. But a mentor would have helped bring some clarity in my college path. Whether with professors or other professional mentors... connect, connect, connect!

Cultural Responsiveness

Cultural intelligence and cultural responsiveness are the abilities that allow people to see the differences in opportunities and treatment given to some while being denied to others. These abilities also help controlling one’s own feelings and perspectives to be completely impartial and therefore fair in any situation. This is not always easy as everyone has their own beliefs and way-of-life that are unique to them. But, cultural intelligence is necessary for U.S. communities to flourish as these are comprised of many people and usually these are of different cultures as well. Some strategies discussed during the seminar were curiosity and emotional intelligence. I will focus on adopting these two in my professional life to make sure I am being fair to those around me. Curiosity to me means staying alert to those things that other cultures do but I don’t understand and tend to dismiss. If something about one culture or person puzzles me, I will ask or do my own research to know what it means. Emotional intelligence means to put aside my own feelings to welcome new information. If anyone is interested in working on their cultural responsiveness, the following article gives a very straight-to-the-point overview and good examples. Guzman, Maria R., Durden, Tonia R., Taylor, Sarah A., Guzman, Jackie M., Potthoff, Kathy L. (2016). Cultural competence: An important skill set for the 21st century. NebGuide, Nebraska Extension. https://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/html/g1375/build/g1375.htm#:~:text=Displaying%20the%20cultural%20competence%20behaviors,similarities%20and%20differences%20among%20cultures.

About Me

Hello there! My name is Wendy Pinon and I'm a senior at ASU, pursuing my bachelors in Pharmacology & Toxicology. This semester has been long awaited! I am getting more clarity as to what I want to do after graduation and am very excited yet a bit scared, truth be told. This semester, I am taking an intro to programming class. This new interest started last semester with the help of my TRAIN class in which we were introduced to computer science and I learned about the biological data science masters program. I am in the process of applying to this program and am very excited about it as it challenges me in everyway possible. The idea of doing something that comes easily for the rest of my life.. was daunting to me. But with programming, I know I will be continually challenged and pushed to keep learning throughout my life. And that is one of my goals in life: to always keep learning, always keep growing. Happy semester everyone!

Social Media for the Professionals

Last week on our TRAIN class, we had a visitor come in and talk to us about developing our online presence professionally. She is Dakota Webber from ASU’s Career and Professional Development Services (CPDS). During her presentation, we were prompted to visit our LinkedIn accounts and reconfigure them a bit to fit our goals. One of the things we did was to follow and connect with people that we could see as our mentors. I was not able to find a specific person who does what I want to do in the future but I did find a few that are in very closely related fields. There was a question on my mind: I asked if we needed to put our entire work history on our profile since most positions that I've held do not pertain to the field in which I am interested. It is not needed but a fellow classmate did mention she was able to land an internship thanks to her mentioning on her LinkedIn account that she used to bartend. So even though these positions do not pertain to our field, they are life experiences that can help us develop skills to handle different situations.

The TRAIN mixer brings gratitude to the forefront

This past Friday, I attended the TRAIN mixer at the ASU West campus. The room was filled with current TRAIN students as well as a few future transfer students. Welcoming us was the team of professors that support this program. I always enjoy this mixer as well as the class. This group of students is one of the most welcoming group I have encountered in my educational journey. They are all transfer students from local community colleges, like myself. They understand the journey to get to where we are and they all seem to have similar goals. We are all in the sciences, so they understand the importance of having and giving support as these are not easy degrees. The thing that I like the most of these mixers is the openness with which we all come. Everyone is open to talking, even those who are not the most social. Since we have things in common, it is always easy to find ways to communicate and connect. For example, while talking to future transfer students I noticed some had questions about the transfer process. It is hard to believe I went thru that same process less than two years ago. The one piece of advice I gave them was to keep in touch with their TRAIN program coordinators as much as possible. During my first year in the program at Phoenix College, I had a person with whom I would meet over Zoom (Covid times) to go over the current research I was exploring. Although I am unsure of his title, he was able to guide me thru the process by reminding me the dates to apply to ASU, the seminars I should attend, and he was able to bring other coordinators into our meetings whenever I would ask questions he couldn’t answer. My leaders made the transfer process so incredibly easy that I didn’t feel any anxiety, which I tend to have naturally when I do things I haven’t done before. It was like following a chocolate cake recipe step by step. With their help, I felt as if I was already part of ASU even though I had not even applied. Thank you Phoenix College TRAIN staff. I wouldn’t be here without your hard work. This first generation, adult student will always be grateful to you. -Wendy Pinon

A brief encounter with databases

This semester, we learned about spreadsheets and relational databases. The first we practiced on handling were spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are excel files with data that can be connected from one sheet to another. At the bottom of the sheets, more tabs can be made. On the new tab, information from the previous tabs can be recalled using specific prompts. The information on these sheets can be maneuvered and new information can be obtained from the info at hand. Some examples are obtaing the average from a dataset and finding which scores were the most popular on a test. Relational databases are a bit different. These are used strictly for recalling information from a spreadsheet and the information cannot be manipulated to give new stats. The only thing a person can manipulate is how the data is presented. This is also achieved through a set of commands, just like excel with spreadsheets. Also, we were able to manipulate spreadsheets with excel while relational databases required us to download a different software called DB Browser for SQLite.

For our database class project, we obtained an excel file that contained stats on various diseases. It contained information such as the amount of infected individuals and the total population count in the states during specific years. If we wanted to know how many cases of a particular disease took place during any given year, then it would take us a bit of time to find the information. Making relational databases helped us group and present the information in the ways we wanted them presented. Through the use of prompts, we were able to filter the information and have the system show us things such as the exact number of people infected in a specific year, in a certain year, with a specific disease such as measles.

While reflecting on these projects, a few lessons stood out to me. First for the relational database: the prompts we input on the first line of commands dictates the amount of columns that will be presented on the query. Another thing I learned was that this method is most like the method used by my previous employers when I would search up information that could not be changed by me. Although the system looked different, it was through very strict commands that customer information would be shown to me. I also noticed that the databases can be made by manipulating the information on spreadsheets. While reflecting on this process it seemed to me that when working on a system for an employer, programmers must input information on spreadsheets and manipulate it to cover any possible request. Then it is decided how to display the information with a relational database. With relational databases, unauthorized personnel won't be able to change the numbers. And only key personnel can have access to the spreadsheets.

Learning about databases has motivated me into enrolling into the biological data science masters' program. Although I have not enrolled at the moment, I did sign up for an introductory class for next semester. I was truly lost about where to go with my educational journey since medical school is not an option due to education costs and my responsibilities as a parent. But, this class has shown me that I can still do something I enjoy with my current degree path. The masters' program is available online or through evening classes so it would be easier for me to work a morning job and do my classwork in the evenings. . . I am so grateful for this opportunity to have dipped my feet into databases. Thank you, Professor Dietrich, for showing us the other side of research.

Persistence and vulnerability in Action

This semester and last have been particularly hard for me but I feel as if my life has become ten times more fulfilling and it pushes me to keep going forward. This previous fall, I started at ASU after slowly obtaining my associate's degree from Phoenix College. The workload has inscreased, along with a move, and many other life changes. I have been stuck on getting what I get and not throwing a fit. Asking professors for any kind of help has always felt like a hard thing to do. But lately, I have had to ask for help. The workload had gotten to me and I was turning in less than stellar work. I felt like a failure. I knew lots of people ask for extensions but I didn't want to lay my heart out to my professors. Last week, my lab partner and I had a hard time understanding the statistics side of our research. I had already accepted in my heart that we would get a really bad grade. She, on the other hand, immediately emailed the professor asking for an extension. I honestly thought we did not deserve the extension since we had all of spring break to work on the assignment, and we didn't. I had once reached out to her because I thought I might have Covid so I missed one lab. She emailed me back saying that if the test returned negative, she would not be able to excuse my absence and I would not be able to make up the lab. It was negative, so I lost 30 points. It was clear to me that she would not budge this time around either. To my surprise, the professor did allow us an extension and even got together with us to explain the results and to help us interpret them correctly. Vulnerability. Persistence. I have read countless books about asking others for help, heard the podcasts, preached it to everyone that needed to hear it.. yet, I didn't allow myself to be vulnerable and I had quit after one failure. I was so stuck on my box of perfection that I even thought I was not deserving of the opportunity. This week, I spoke with another professor about my less-than-stellar lab notebook. And, she gave me a second chance to improve my work! It's definitely not easy to ask for help. But I have to admit it, sometimes I do need help. And it is okay to not understand things the first time. Have a wonderful week everyone. If you want to grow, keep growing by stay vulnerable. Here's a cute picture of the wildlife I spotted during an ecology lab outing: