As a Biology major, research is a critical learning experience. Before coming to Minnesota State University Mankato, I had little-to-no experience in a lab setting and no experience at all with research. In hindsight, being a part of the honors program brought me closer to research which is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my college career. My research experiences will help me in medical school and in my career as a Pediatrician. My first experience learning about research was in my FYEX-Honors course, where we dedicated several classes to discussing different aspects of research. This experience helped me to reach information literacy levels. At the end of the unit, I wrote a research essay about the importance of research in many different fields. I was able to find outside information about the importance of research and use that information in my paper. That paper gave me an outlook on the significance and requirements of research, and I was able to use that information to help me write a lab report in my Biology 105 course. For this lab report I discussed the four organic macromolecules and how we can test which macromolecules are in certain foods we eat. This required me to do work outside of lab where I found scientific articles of other’s research. I used the information I found useful and combined it with the data I found in my tests to synthesize this lab report. The lab report provided me with a good base of how to find outside information and incorporate it with my own data. I used these techniques again when I wrote my final project for my Spanish 210w course. For this project, I chose to write about a company in Mexico that makes bioplastics. I had to take my knowledge of the country of Mexico and combine it with lots of outside research about this company and bioplastics and create this project. There was a lot of information on bioplastics, so it was important to find the best articles for my project. This involved me sorting through tons of opinions pieces about whether or not bioplastics are a realistic option. I put together multiple opinions to help form my own final conclusion/opinion for the project. This project helped me achieve information synthesis in the research competency. My junior year at MSU, I got involved with a research lab group run by Dr. Cohen. In this lab I was able to enhance my lab skills, my skills in reading scientific papers, and even learn how to put together a poster for the URS. All of my experiences in this lab group helped me to achieve original research and dissemination of results in the research competency. A requirement for our lab meetings is to present a scientific paper related to our specific research. My research partner and I read a scientific paper and made a PowerPoint of the hypothesis, materials/methods, and the main results and conclusions. This led us to think about how this paper could relate to what we are researching and how we could possibly apply it to our research. One of my favorite parts of being a part of a research lab has been presenting our research findings at the URS. This allowed us to combine all of our data and findings and share it with people from multiple different departments. This experience also helped me to learn how to combine all of our data into a much shorter, easier to understand summary. My experiences in research will help me tremendously when I go to medical school as well as when I start working in a hospital. I will now have the ability to understand how research works and use that ability to read others' research on advances in medicine and use that knowledge when assessing patients.