Rebecca Kiesel

Undergraduate Fellow

“It’s hard to stay motivated because you get wrapped up in the grunt work and you think, I’m filling holes, and I’m just moving dirt around all day and weeding. What is the eventual end? You lose sight of the broader picture.

I think it’s really great to have our weekly lab meetings in which we talk about that broader picture and how the work will translate to the scientific community. Otherwise I would really get bogged down in the day-to-day labor. When they pull you back out and back into the intellectual realm and say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re doing again, just to remind you,’ it gets you re- motivated every week. I think it’s super important to have that.

Rebecca worked with Scott Mangan and Claudia Stein's Natural Enemies team during summer 2018. Learn more about their plant-microbial communities research here.