Student Perspectives

Hey everyone! I hope your summers have been well! Things have flown by. I thought I’d give you all an update. I am currently preparing for my next journey in the D.C. metro area science policy space as an American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Fellow in the Division of Engineering Education Centers in the Broadening Participation in Engineering division. Also, I’d like to take this time to thank the Rutgers iJOBS community. The various programs I participated in were eye opening and broadened my perspectives.

Not too long ago, I went to my good friend, Jay Patel's, surprise graduation party. He PhinisheD!  (Phinished = a pun on finishing the PhD process). Congrats Dr. Patel! I'm sure there's only one of you out there! (Haha-- just forget about the other three Dr. Patels in your immediate family alone)

  For this post, I decided to do something different. Instead of doing the usual post about a serious topic, I wanted to lighten the mood. As graduate students and post docs, we all work long, hard hours. Our personalities tend to skew towards introversion, yet we must often work with, or at least near others. This can be frustrating, because, PEOPLE can be frustrating! Inevitably, pet peeves develop. For this post, I went around interviewing a handful of my peers, asking them what their lab pet peeves were.

Hi everyone! My name is Monal Mehta. I am a second-year graduate student in the Neuroscience department, working under Dr. James Millonig. Outside of the one year I spent in Pennsylvania, I’ve been living in New Jersey for the past 24 years! My initial interest in the brain started when I was young. I was fascinated that humans all had the same organ – a brain – but everyone was so different, from their thoughts, experiences and memories, to their likes and dislikes.

I got my job in industry through networking, and I’m not ashamed to admit that (or at least, I’m trying not to be).

As I think back to when I was applying to colleges (nearly 10 years ago...wow!) and began to think seriously about my career plans, I remember scrolling through web pages that described all of the different majors a student could enroll in. After scanning through several of these "major search engines", Biomedical Engineering (BME) stuck out.