Don\u2019t dwell on what you don\u2019t know, advises Varun Chamarty \u201926 (ENG).<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people, they\u2019ll come up with an idea, and then they\u2019ll kill it in their own brain,\u201d says Chamarty, a pre-med rising junior studying biomedical engineering at UConn.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the best way to begin is by just beginning. You have an idea. You run with it. Trial and error. See what works. See what doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
That, ultimately, is what all scientific research boils down to: An idea that you test, a hypothesis that you investigate, with the hope of learning, finding, or discovering\u2026something.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what Chamarty has been doing this summer \u2013 testing an idea, just to see what happens, with the hope of contributing in some way to an active and growing field of study.<\/p>\n
Before he graduated from Farmington High School, Chamarty discovered his own interest in robotics and also took part in Cutting Edge<\/a>, a program that pairs high school students with graduate students at UConn Health, offering the opportunity to learn about things like biotechnology, bioinformatics, and other DNA-centric technologies.<\/p>\n \u201cAdmittedly, it wasn\u2019t my thing,\u201d Chamarty says, but what did interest him was technology and research \u2013 neuroscience, in particular.<\/p>\n \u201cNeuroscience is so different from the rest of anatomy,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ll take an anatomy class, and if it\u2019s two semesters, you\u2019ll learn one semester about the whole body. And then, the other semester will be all about the brain, because there\u2019s so many things there. And there\u2019s even more that we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n