Hello, we are the Student Genetics Research Group! I assume you are either a teacher, evaluating the work our team did for the mini-thesis competition, since I’ll have linked this English version on the Korean one. Or you are me. There is a chance mathematically that you are a random person on the internet who randomly stumbled upon my blog, but I don’t think it’s significant enough to count.
I am Sim Ho(심호), the head of our “Research” team. We have two other members; Song Tae Hee (송태희), and Park Sae Young(박세영), who appears when I need help.
In this post, I’ll be introducing the reason behind our motivation to ‘research’ this topic, and what we are actually doing in as much detail as possible.
As a member of a program that I won’t talk about in detail for the sake of staying in topic, I had the chance to visit a professor’s lab for around half a year. One of many questions I asked him was about his on going research, and he replied me that he doesn’t have anything going on at the time, but that he previously did a lot of research on fruit flies.
This is where my curiosity kicked in. Out of all possible research candidates, why fruit flies? I later learned all its advantages in genetic research, and wanted to try a fruit fly experiment on my own. So far, the only thing I could think of was trying to map the fruit fly genome on my own.
That isn’t research, you might say. And yes, I agree. I’m discovering what is already known to the world very clearly. This is my cheap replacement for what I actually want to research due to the lack of tools in our school. Even then, it may or may not be known to the world already. It’s my fault not being able to think of simpler topics, but I’d like to say that the lack of tools is, without a doubt, making it harder for me.
However, I feel that raw information about an experiment isn’t everything for a thesis. Thesis as a whole may challenge the well-known, or indirectly motivate others do contribute to the stated research by gaining attention. Although my research won’t bring any new data, I am challenging my knowledge in genetics and my ability to conduct a research. I believe the teachers are not here to evaluate the results, but the process of the research. The experiments we conduct aren’t too hard, but they aren’t easy as well. I’m here to show how good we are at researching, not to bring new data to the world. Not yet.
Anyway, that’s it for the introduction. Instead of laying down my plans on the research right now, I think it’d be better if I show it instead. By that, I mean see you guys on the next post.