Willie Collado
Class of 2003-Present
East Side Community H.S.
Presently: Hofstra University
Topic: Study of Environmental Quality: Restoring the Bronx River
About:
Hi, My name is Willie Collado. I’m a senior student at Eastside Community High School. This summer I was working at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The area I worked at was the Rockefeller Building. The experience I got from working at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was amazing. In the beginning, before joining the program with the Harlem Children Society with Dr. Sat Bhattacharya, I was told that there was a summer internship working in laboratories. I was interested, and I was told that I had to go to an interview. On the day of the interview, I met Dr. Sat Bhattacharya and handed in my resume. He then interviewed me. After a week or so, I received a call from him and I was told that I was accepted for the summer internship. When I finally arrived to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, I met Dr. Sat Bhattacharya and I was given forms to sign. I was also told information about the internship. Once the forms were sent back to him, he introduced to me to my mentor at the Rockefeller Building. My mentor was Dr. Roberta Rivi. She showed me around the laboratory, and introduced to me the work I was about to do in the summer. My mentor also gave me some reading packets so that I could get more familiar with chemistry and biology. This was interesting for me because I learned a lot more on things on those two topics than what I was already taught at high school.
On the first few days working in a laboratory, I was confused because there was so much to do and there were a lot of things that I didn’t understand. My mentor and many of the other workers were real nice in helping and explaining things to me. I found this real helpful because there were certain points during the first few days where I didn’t know what I was doing. I kept on reading more on the packets that my mentor gave me, and I reminded myself the things I read and how it could be related to what I was doing. This was when things started to become clear for me. After I got familiar with the work I was doing, it became real easy, and the things I was learning became simple for me to understand. The kind of work I did was to trace the recessive gene mutations on a generation of mice. I didn’t exactly use the mice, but I used liver samples of a generation of mice in order to get the DNA. Once I had the DNA I could use it to trace the recessive gene mutations that occurred in the generation of mice. The way this was done was by cutting small pieces of liver and doing a whole bunch of procedures in order to get a right amount of DNA to study. I then used a primer, which focuses on a specific chromosome in the gene to help identify which chromosome caused the mutation. I used different kinds of machines such as a PCR machine to duplicate copies of DNA so that I could get better results. I also used a gel electrophoresis tank and ran my DNA samples on gel so that I could read the results. This kind of results that I was looking for was to determine whether the mice got their DNA from the mother, the father, or both. This was a very long process because each test takes between 3-4 hours to do. After awhile I got used to doing this work. It became fun for me as well as challenging.