Researching in the Rain

By Anna Lee

If you had told a fifteen-year-old me that in five years’ time I would be spending hours out in a Costa Rican thunderstorm catching spiders, I probably would have shrugged and wondered when I got so cool. While I (unfortunately) cannot confirm that second fact, spending an evening chasing spiders would not have been a surprise. I’ve never been afraid of the natural world or its more creepy crawly inhabitants. My mother and friends have used this ability for most of my life, letting me catch and release anything that may get in the house in a designated “bug jar” before they could squish it. While I never thought this practice would be needed in my academic career, it did come in handy while collecting spiders for a research project in my fall semester in Costa Rica.

While spiders have never made me uncomfortable, I cannot say the same thing about research. Undergraduate research is constantly used as a selling point at schools across the United States, including my home institution of Duke University. Research is everywhere, professors talk about their own projects, friends brag about positions in labs… but in my life? Research has never had a place. I have never been able to focus my diverse set of interests enough to consider applying for a job in any single professor’s lab, or to imagine myself contemplating one set of research questions for an entire semester or year.

However, one of my primary motivations in coming on this particular study abroad was the fact that I would be made to participate in a variety of research projects under the guidance of resident and guest professors from around the world. In five weeks here, I have helped collect data for five different projects, working with frogs, birds, lizards, ants and, of course, spiders. Each project is over in just a few days, peaking our curiosity without letting the students get bored. In this case, less than 48 hours after the spiders were captured from broadleaf bromeliad plants in the Wilson Botanical Garden, an experiment was performed, and the spiders were released back to where they had been collected.  

Research has always been presented as the logical step for a biology major with no interest in  the more typical pre-professional tracks. Without practical experience, however, I’ve never felt comfortable in plotting that path out for myself. In a little over a month, experience and advice has been thrown at me from an incredible group of professors, and I have learned more about what I want for my life than I would have dared to hope for before I came to this country. Will I spend my life doing research? Who knows. But for the first time, I feel like I have the tools to make that call for myself. That, to me, is worth the plane ticket.