Alumni
Profiles of Success
Colleen McMichael
Senior Laboratory Technician
DuPont Company
B.S. Genetic Biology and Plant Biology and Physiology, 1998, Purdue
"Undergraduate research is a must…Otherwise, when students leave school, they don't know if they can tolerate a lab job."
Colleen McMichael became interested in lab work while she was a student at Purdue. "As an undergraduate, I had a work-study job in a biochemistry lab," she explains. "It reinforced my class work with hands-on experience." Her research was done in the lab of Dr. Clinton Chapple, whom she continued working for as a laboratory technician after graduation.
Today Colleen is employed with DuPont Company as a senior lab technician. DuPont was originally a chemical company, but is now involved in many aspects of biotechnology. As can be expected, a typical day for Colleen revolves around experiments. "I conduct experiments, plan future experiments, write up my findings, clean up and do it all again the next day," she says. Keeping a thorough lab notebook is very important, and other responsibilities include organizing others to share in routine lab duties, ordering, and keeping up lab stocks. Colleen's research is in the areas of biochemistry, molecular biology, and plant genetics, and she is currently working to engineer plants to make polymers. Although there are six people in her lab, only she and her boss (who is a Principle Investigator (PI) with a Ph.D. in Biology) work on the same project. There are two other PI's in the lab who work with their respective technicians on their own research.
Colleen suggests that students take courses outside of their discipline to enhance their education. Courses outside of biology that she found extremely beneficial were classes in horticulture, including Plant Physiology and Plant Growth and Development, as well as the botany course titled Plant Anatomy. She also encourages undergraduates to "take advantage of all your resources," including study groups and TA's, who are there to help students understand difficult concepts. Finally, she strongly advises current students to pursue undergraduate research to see if they enjoy lab work. "My undergraduate research experience helped me to decide if lab work was for me," she says. "Undergraduate research is a must…Otherwise, when students leave school, they don't know if they can tolerate a lab job." The benefits she gained from working in the lab go beyond research experience. "It also helped me make contacts," she explains," and I published papers, which is invaluable."
According to Colleen, "the personal satisfaction of a job well done" is the most rewarding part of her work. "I can't even claim that it's rewarding to have a positive result, because in science you can't count on that," she says. "A negative result can open the door to many more possible routes for your research to follow."