Mills NCSU REU

Taylor Mills REU scenes

Taylor Mills writes about her NSF REU below. REUs are excellent vehicles for extramural education. Consider applying for one next year. Even better, they are (mostly) fully funded.--Ed K.


After wasting three long summers as an undergrad, I finally got the opportunity of a lifetime. Thanks to fellow honors student, friend, and now-SAU alumni Subir Shakya, I found out about the Research Experience for Undergraduates program funded by NSF. I applied to five different universities hoping to become an intern at University of Louisville in Louisville, KY and at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. I was elated when NCSU was the first to accept me into their REU program! What made the news even more exciting was that I was born in the state and I spent most of my summers there with my dad and his family. It had been almost 4 years since I last visited.


As a first time flyer, I was very much nervous--only thinking about the bad things that could possibly happen to an airplane! However, once I landed in Raleigh and was driven to the NCSU campus, all those nerves disappeared and I was once again very excited to get things rolling!


The first week consisted of biotechnology boot camp or in less intimidating terms polishing up some lab skills and learning new but simple lab techniques such as calibrating micropipettes and doing DNA electrophoresis. After the first week, we were sent to our labs to meet with our mentors. I worked with an assistant professor who had previously worked in the life sciences department at Duke University, a biomathematics graduate student, and a retired biochemist from Slovakia.


The focus of my project was on plant stem cells which are the same stem cells that are normally talked about in animals. I spent two months understanding how certain mechanisms that function in plant stem cells were being regulated. Not only did I learn a great deal about stem cells in general, but I learned about genetics on the molecular level, applying mathematics to better understand biological processes, and I used a fancy instrument known as the confocal laser scanning microscope.
Of course when the lab work wasn’t too demanding, I made time for fun and random conversations with my lab mates who were from Puerto Rico and Brazil.


Another first for me was being able to present a poster at an undergraduate research conference. Hopefully, I will have another opportunity to present my research and poster at the Mid-South Undergraduate Research Conference here at SAU in October. But I will share my full experience in my internship class at the end of the semester.