Alberto Del Rosario
Class of 2004 - Present
Manhattan Center for Science & Math
2006 Topic:
Topic: Cloning of Recombinant Expression Vectors that Encode for Inteleukin - 15 (IL-15), Inteleukin-21 (IL-21) and Luciferase for Tumor Immunology Studies
About:
My name is Alberto Del Rosario and I am a fifteen year old junior at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. I enrolled on a three-year college course named Advanced Science Research (ASR) that consists of many rigorous tasks such as reading journal articles and finding the help of a mentor to expand your knowledge on the topic you are researching. As I started my first year in the course I found it to be extremely difficult because reading journal articles was not an easy task. I applied to the Science Research Training Program (SRTP) of the New York Academy of Sciences in hope of finding a mentor to aid me in ASR. I was not allowed to apply to SRTP because you had to become sixteen by the end of the program and I was not going to be able to reach the age of fifteen by the final date. I was depressed because of this but I was still certain that I would be able to obtain a mentor before I left ASR. One of my classmates had a mentor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) named Dr. Sat Bhattacharya. Dr. Sat told my ASR teacher that he was soon going to be holding interviews for Project Seed of the Harlem Children Society. He told her specifically to send in six students from our class but first we had to make a resume and have a copy of our transcripts. There were thirteen students that were going to compete for one of the six student positions who were going to be interviewed by Dr. Sat and I was determined to be accepted into this program but it was not going to be as easy as I thought.
I completed all the requirements to compete with my classmates for a position but I was soon to find out that I was not picked to be one of the students to get interviewed. Our summers had to be free in order for us to apply and one girl dropped her place because she had plans for her summer and another girl took the position. Then the other girl also had plans so she dropped her position and I was offered it. I took the offer but now I faced the problem that I needed to dress formally so I called my house and my grandmother had to bring me the clothing to school. I got dressed in a hurry and all seven students including Pankaj Saha (who was the classmate that told us about the program and his mentor was Dr. Sat) left towards the interview. We all waited anxiously for the arrival of Dr. Sat to the waiting room that we were placed in. When he arrived we were happy to see him and he soon started to talk about cancer. Then he interviewed us separately and I did pretty well because I was not nervous at all. Soon he sent the results to my ASR teacher who made me aware that I had been accepted to the program. I was excited and extremely happy because throughout the year I had not been such a good student but now I was going to prove that I was responsible enough and good enough to stay in ASR.
I was to report to Dr. Alexej Jerschow at New York University to learn about my new topic spectroscopy. Soon after our first meeting Dr. Jerschow figured that it was going to be extremely difficult for a high school student to learn about spectroscopy and the work that was being performed in the lab. I was then reassigned to meet with Dr. Michel Sadelain at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . I would have liked to work on spectroscopy but the cloning of plasmids was something that I was going to love working on. I went to meet with Dr. Sadelain and he seemed as a great mentor and he liked the help I was going to bring to the lab. I was left in the lab to explore when I met John Markley (a MD/Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University ) who was soon going to become my co-mentor. I performed many experiments and soon worked independently but with help available. I was a student representative for Dr. Sat and it gave me the ability to have responsibilities. The second year students were going to Philadelphia , Pennsylvania to present their topics at the Annual American Chemical Society convention but I was soon to become the only first year student of New York project Seed to go along with them. I was held charge of making sure who was attending and at what time the bus left to pick up the students in New Jersey which gave me more responsibility to take on. I presented well in Philadelphia and the street fair (all students of project Seed had to attend and present). This experience has helped me in my ASR course, college preparation, responsibility, and many more things. Most of all, this program helped me enjoy my summer in a scientific way and I plan to keep working in my lab all throughout the year.