Bioscience technology

My name is Trish Willy and I'm an instructor in the Bioscience technology department here at PCC at Rock Creek. Bioscience technology is really kind of all-inclusive which is a group of companies and organizations that are all interested in biology and science and use technology to answer questions, solve problems develop drugs and better food sources, things like that so it includes all kinds of companies, even medical device companies, that are making life better through science and technology. Our students are in the lab most of the day; they basically have a breakdown of classes and the classes go for about four and a half hours each and each one of those classes is based on doing specific techniques. So for instance yesterday students might have done protein purification the whole day, they might run columns, they might do all kinds of things to manipulate proteins and they'll do that for a couple days and the next couple days they'll have a DNA class which is what my students are doing right now and there they might be taking DNA from bacteria or cells and actually try to do PCR and some DNA techniques that actually clone genes, so they're doing that and then over the course of time they'll be able to look at the products that they've cloned. They'll look at the DNA sequences and they'll identify things about what they've cloned and how it might be different from other types of organisms. So they do it all kind of day by day, the projects actually take a long time so over the course of a quarter they get a lot of experience doing all kinds of different things that all come back together as a project. We use a lot of great equipment in the lab. When we do DNA work and protein work those are things you can't normally see so we have to use equipment that allows us to stain things. We use UV light boxes, we use centrifuges, and we use a lot of equipment to measure very small volumes. They also use computers a lot, so a lot of the DNA data analysis that we have to do we do with computers. Our labs are are set up so that the students have access to computers to be able to run software programs to analyze the DNA and protein sequences and things, so we try to mix in bioinformatics which is that the science of really understanding the information that comes in DNA and protein. So we mix that in with our classes so students really understand how it fits into the bigger picture. In doing scientific research in general, it is a big challenge because for everything that works and for all the exciting things that are discovered there's a lot that doesn't work and people that go into a research field or science based field do it for then the discovery aspect of it but you have to be patient and you have to be willing to fail a lot and so there's a lot of things that don't work and that's not really for everybody sometimes but when it does work it makes it all that much better. It's an exciting field but there's a lot of ups and downs. Students, they come in really excited about the program and ready to learn and when they leave their so confident and they're so good at what they do and it's really a great feeling to see my students now after they've been in the program for almost a year and know that they'll be able to go out and confidently work in a lab and actually make a real contribution whether they're working at a company or in academic research. I have no doubt that my students will be able to understand the research going on and make significant contributions based on what they are able to do when they finish our classes. They're great. They're just really great students.