I’m very gratified that I attended NIGINTERN though it was between a busy semester and the one-month-long summer practice of my baseball team. The NIGINTERN project was a wonderful experience to me. I’ve been fascinated about the culture and lifestyle of Japan and hoped to study and do research in Japan in the future. So this internship was an opportunity for me to experience doing research and living in Japan, and it didn’t disappoint me.

Sawa sensei is a very respectable professor. Under his guidance, I learned not only the technique of the experiment but also many concepts of doing research. He taught me to do science, to think about what is the meaning underlying the data and adjust the research schedule according to the data, not just continually collecting the data. I also learned a lot from Sawa sensei about the ability of to analyze and explain the data, and learned the skill to bring out the key point in the presentation. Also, he is a very kind person. Besides teaching me how to do the experiments on his own, he also taught me to play tennis. Moreover, he told me which train to take to get to NIG from the airport before this internship, and he also lent me the bag to climb Mt. Fuji, etc.

My lab in Taiwan is mainly about cancer stem cell. In this internship, I chose a totally different experiment system, C. elegans, so it was a challenge for me at first. Fortunately, I gained a lot from C. elegan, like the molecular mechanism of asymmetric division and the Wnt signaling and secretion pathway, and they are also very important to stem cell biology.

NIG is a perfect place for doing research. During the lab visit, I saw a variety of research topics, from mitosis to endosymbiosis, from molecular biology to ecology. Any aspect of biological research is available in NIG. It really broadened my knowledge about biology.

I really appreciated this opportunity, and I want to thank everyone in NIG to give me a substantial internship. Hope one day I can go back to NIG again!