Empowerly

Student profile

Write a brief essay (300-400 words) in which you respond to the following question: Successful students at Johns Hopkins make the biggest impact by collaborating with others, including peers, mentors, and professors. Talk about a time, in or outside the classroom, when you worked with others and what you learned from the experience.

Last summer, I was honored to be a Fellow of the Simons Summer Research Program, interning at the Stony Brook University’s Department of Radiology under Dr. Timothy Duong. I worked on the automatic segmentation of multiple sclerosis lesions on magnetic resonance imaging scans using deep learning (a type of artificial intelligence), testing the accuracy of a U-Net implementation of a convolutional neural network.

I was determined to leave the program with a working prototype of my network, improving the diagnostic capabilities of radiologists to identify the hard-to-detect multiple sclerosis lesions. Alone, this task was impossible in my short span of 6 weeks at the program. But in a lab group setting, I realized research is a collaborative effort. When my neural network started running into memory errors, I required heavy computing resources the Department of Radiology did not have. I reached out to the Computer Science Department and was granted access to their supercomputer, enabling me to run my models more efficiently. 

Further into the project, I presented my research progress at the weekly lab meetings, after which members of the lab questioned my methodology and findings. Each member of the group provided valuable insight into various aspects of my project, bringing their own perspective to the table. I learned to welcome constructive criticism and feedback. With their help, I learned to analyze my work from different angles and found solutions to problems much faster than I could have alone. I realized that research, especially interdisciplinary research like my project, requires collaboration at every step of the process. No one scientist has all the expertise to solve the problem -- only together as a group of individuals with different talents did we reach my goal. 

Write a brief essay (300-400 words) in which you respond to the following question: Successful students at Johns Hopkins make the biggest impact by collaborating with others, including peers, mentors, and professors. Talk about a time, in or outside the classroom, when you worked with others and what you learned from the experience.

I stood in front of the projector screen, explaining my research to my lab group of graduates, PhDs, and faculty members, all with more experience than I. 

After presenting one slide, a lab member put his hand up. “Why did you decide on this methodology?”, he asked. 

I was taken aback. I had barely started my presentation, and had already been interrupted. 

At the time, I was interning at the Stony Brook University Department of Radiology as a fellow of the Simons Summer Research Program under the mentorship of Dr. Timothy Duong. I researched the diagonosis of multiple sclerosis lesions on MRI scans using deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence. 

Each week, I presented my research progress to my lab group, detailing my hypothesis, methodology, and newest updates. My mentor would often bring different colleagues in to analyse different aspects of my work.

The questions I was asked ranged from “What is artificial intelligence?” to “Do you think the implementation of a recurrent neural network would work better compared to a convolutional neural network?” I had to be prepared for both the simple and the highly complex, and my methodology and thought process was often questioned. 

At first, I resented these questions, feeling humiliated, thinking that my lab members were pointing out my inexperience. But as time went on, I realized they were only improving my project, and I learned to analyze my work at new angles. 

Each member of the group provided valuable insight into various aspects of my project. They all brought their own unique perspective to the table, and with their help, I found solutions to problems much faster than I could have alone. For example, a radiologist pointed out that I would get better results if I sliced my data into different patches and a computer scientist let me know of software tools I could use for more accurate preprocessing. 

I realized that research, especially interdisciplinary research like my project, requires collaboration at every step of the process. A true researcher must be humble, open to different ideas and criticisms, because no one scientist has all the expertise to solve the problem. At the end of my summer, I finished my project triumphantly, knowing I could not have done it without the help of my lab group. Not only was my project a success, but I had also become a better researcher in the process.