For many a lonely day sailed across the milky seas
Ne’er looked back, never feared, never cried

– ’39 — Queen (Brian May)

Since the release of Bohemian Rhapsody (If you haven’t seen the movie yet, go watch it; it is phenomenal!), I’ve been trying to explore Queen’s discography. I’m currently listening to ’39 from their album A Night At The Opera. This song— written by Dr. Brian May, talks about the story of a group of space explorers and their journey to discover a new universe. However, due to the time dilation effect, 100 years passes by back on Earth, while for the space explorers, it only felt like a 1 year journey, so their loved ones have already died by the time they return home. I think besides Bohemian Rhapsody, this quickly became one of my absolute favorite songs from both the album and the band in general! The lyrics that I highlighted in this post sort of remind me about my own journey through college.

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Food science involves many disciplines; such as food safety, food engineering, nutrition, ingredient innovations, etc.! So I found it really difficult to narrow down my interests.  I eventually settled for food microbiology and biotechnology, because I took more microbiology related courses throughout my junior year of college, and it really is a fascinating field. I also worked in a research lab at National Taiwan University that worked with yeasts and endemic fungal strains for various applications (Summer study abroad program). It was a really cool experience, and encouraged me to pursue more undergraduate research opportunities during my last year of college, since I had no other food science experience outside of academia.

During my senior year, I worked in one of my food microbiology professor’s research lab; where his students works on yeast metabolic engineering. The general idea is that if you feed yeast strains with some sort of sugar, they typically produce ethanol or other compounds as byproducts. With metabolic engineering, additional DNA is added into parental yeast strains to change the way the fungus can metabolize these sugars, typically through fermentation. As a result, it can cause the yeast strain to produce higher amounts of a desired product — such as biofuel compounds, sugars, and much more! Even though you are genetically modifying the organism, this doesn’t directly affect the chemical composition of the target byproducts. In particular, I worked with a grad student with 2′-Fucosyllactose and had an additional side-project involving another sugar during the past summer.

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2’Fucosyllactose — commonly known as 2′-FL, is a sugar (Human Milk Oligossacharide) composed of Fucose, Glucose, and Galactose (Glucose + Galactose = Lactose). This is an abundant compound in human breast milk, and is very nutritious for infants; so you’ll often see this in a lot of infant formulas. Even more so, it’s an expensive sugar to produce; so using engineered yeast to target this oligossacharide would be an economic and safe method (Yeasts are labeled as GRAS [Generally Regarded as Safe] for regulatory purposes).

Working in this lab— and this compound in particular, taught me important skills for performing research and general science experiments; which to be completely honest: is a hard skill to learn. It took me several months to get used to things in lab, and who knows how many mistakes I’ve made in there; however, it was such a great learning experience. I also think it’s really cool how something like this can be used to help lots of people in the future. Furthermore, since I worked with 2′-FL, it sort of introduced me to the broad concept of infant nutrition, which is really interesting and what I’ll be working on at work – so I think 2′-FL is super important!

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So why do I consider this particular molecule to be an important thing? Throughout my time in college, as someone who had a little more experience in web development and completely changed fields to food science, I lacked a lot of general science experience and didn’t exactly have a competitive GPA, so I wasn’t able to land any industry internships. The only thing I was concerned about was graduating on time, and I didn’t have any future plans set up afterwards, which scared me.

The way I saw things, I had two options: Either immediately jump into graduate school, or go apply for jobs and see what happens. Applying for jobs would be a challenge since most of my work experience comes from a web design background or working in school; so I don’t really have any industry internship experience. Graduate school was also an option, but I wasn’t 100% sure as to what I wanted to study.

During the summer, my professor offered me the opportunity to pursue graduate school with him if I really wanted to; which was something that I didn’t expect at all. At my university, if you want to apply to the food science program for the traditional thesis route for graduate school, you have to find a faculty member who is willing to accept you before you start classes; so this opportunity seemed really good. One evening, my mentor (grad student) and I were in the lab working on some experiments, and there was a moment where we had some down-time as we waited for a specific step of an experiment to be completed. One question that he always asked me was what I wanted to do in the future. At the time, I figured I could jump into this field for graduate school and see where it goes from there. However, he advised me to carefully consider this decision. Even though biotechnology is a growing field, this particular career has a few drawbacks. These types of experiments require long hours, so you need to be 100% passionate about this type of research if you want to be successful at it.  I also lacked a lot of traditional molecular biology knowledge, so there would be a much steeper learning curve for me if I wanted to pursue a career within this field.

It was definitely a really hard decision to make, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that I still don’t really know what I want to pursue for graduate school. I know it’s something that I still have intentions of pursuing in the future, but the problem is that I have too many interests, so I don’t really know what I want to narrow down my interests to yet. I figured it would also be good to try to apply for full-time work, and if that doesn’t work; then I’ll apply to graduate school instead. Since getting my first full-time job opportunity (Which I’ll make another post about in the future), I had to make the decision to put graduate school aside for the time being, and also had to turn down my professor’s offer to be a part of the group. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I think working for a while will be a good idea to help me figure out what I really want to do.

Working with 2-‘FL is a huge reason as to why I have this job offer today, and I definitely wouldn’t be here had I not joined my professor’s research lab! Maybe I’ll go back to food microbiology in the future. I’m not really sure yet; but hopefully I’ll figure it out along the way!