Get to know my lab manager - Harshita Sarambale Part 1

Hi everyone! This is Harshita, a current third year medical student who has been working with Dr. Koshy for the past two years. Recently, I started a couple data analysis projects under her guidance and she asked me to write about my experience doing the research as well as the mentorship process.

However, to start talking about this whole story, I have to go back a little further. I initially started working with Dr. Koshy on one of her projects with another occupational therapy faculty member. This was a data analysis project that used a national, publicly available database. This type of research was completely new to me as I’d only done wet and animal lab research before and used R in only one undergraduate class. However, Dr. Koshy guided me through the entire research process in that initial year. Her process of slowly exposing us to the different elements of research was definitely a huge, huge part of this whole learning process. 

She gave us some R code (which was essentially how to import the data as a dataframe haha) and asked us to start with some simple tables and chi-squared calculations which then evolved to more complicated visualizations and statistical models. Throughout the year, my peer and I worked together to learn different R commands and debug each others' codes. We also would have regular meetings where we had to present our findings to the two mentors. And of course, we also slowly were assigned abstracts and gradually filled out our manuscript. This flipped-classroom style was imperative to me learning about the entire research process.

What was really fun was presenting this process as a talk during Touro’s Annual Research Day. My partner and I essentially gave a presentation on how students and faculty members can get involved in data analysis projects by talking about our experience. I feel like people truly don’t understand the benefits of this! There’s almost no funding required, there’s endless publicly available data sets, and all you really need is some coding experience and common sense. That’s not to diminish the quality or caliber of data analysis projects or even say that they are easy. There’s a lot of statistics that are way more advanced than what I would like to talk about, you have to be willing to learn a coding language, and be comfortable working with people in other disciplines. But I just want to highlight that it’s a really interesting and novel way of approaching medical research, especially as a medical student. Wet lab and clinical research are more tedious and time consuming and honestly were difficult to obtain during my first two. Unfortunately, there were pretty much no students at that presentation (I appreciate all the faculty who were there though!). I really wanted to spread this information though. Dean Gilliar came up to my partner and I after the presentation and was really excited about this topic too and that moment was one the highlights of medical school.

Flash-forward to the summer before my third year of medical school. Our initial project had almost come to an end and there was an opportunity to create follow-up studies. Also, at this point in time, I thought I had wanted to go into urology so I decided to do a follow-up paper on urinary incontinence in relation to our original study. I also had a couple ideas that I discussed with Dr. Koshy. She suggested that I find some students to work on my projects. I initially started by asking friends but when I reached out to the first and second year class, I got so many responses, like over 40! This really showed the lack of research opportunities that are (easily) available for students (or maybe it showed the profound enthusiasm towards research, we will never know). I genuinely thought back to that presentation I gave and how it could be an opportunity to actually bring what I had talked about to life. 

What initially began as 3 projects somehow evolved into 13 research projects with 43 first, second, and third year medical students! More on the mentorship process soon!