I met with Mrs. Sparwasser the day of my first speech in class. With her I discussed the bare minimum of my topic and was able to have the opportunity to run through my presentation once with her before I had to give it sixth period. This was extremely helpful to be able to run through the presentation before I had to give it because she gave me some valuable pointers on what things could be cut or simplified in order to give my speech in the limited amount of time. She also pointed out some things about my topic that could be explained in simpler terms so that people without much of a biology background could understand the main points. She also pointed out something that I hadn’t even thought of, that the growth of blood vessels is very similar to the growth of the plant root system. Both are activated by a change in specific chemical concentration and involve elongating certain cells and proliferation of cells in the tips of the spots of growth. She also gave me some insight that will help me move forward in my capstone project by helping me finalize my ideas on switching topics. She said that the new opportunity that my mentor was able to offer up to me would be much better in preparing me for college and encouraged me to pursue this new line of study.

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My meeting with Dr. Wagner was September the 22nd on the Rice Campus. Here I was able to meet with Dr. Wagner in his own personal office where I explained what I hoped to gain out of this project and also explained that I would like any opportunity that he has available to intern and work in his lab. After I gave a brief explanation of all of these things and he explained his job as well as the experiments that he was performing, he offered me the opportunity to work on a new project that he was starting up on schistosomiasis and snails. He got into pretty direct detail about the role of his studies in transgenic species and developmental biology. The meeting that I was able to have with Dr. Wagner made me think about the alternatives that he offered up to me and caused me to really think about what I hoped to gain from the experience of capstone. From his opportunity I thought about the new benefits that he explained to me and thought that this would be a much better opportunity for me in the fact that it offers me valuable experience in the production of my own experiments and research papers that would have the potential to be published. He described the specifics of the things that I would be able to work on that included the breeding of my own snails at my home in order to find the most optimum way for them to breed and the best way to collect their eggs so that we can perform the necessary gene replacements to create transgenic species and explained that he would guide me in the discovery of similar genes in the genome of the snail to the genomes of mice, humans, and zebrafish. Later on next week he offered up the opportunity to meet again where he would teach me the basics of navigating genome databases and locating similarities in the codes of different animals. I know that the new path he offered up to me will be much more beneficial in the long run and is actually a very interesting project that would allow me to gain much more practical experience than just plain research with angiogenesis.