Intern stories
Travis Lubbers, Empirical Biosciences
What projects did you take part in during your internship?
I worked at Fortis Life Sciences (Empirical Bioscience) in Grand Rapids, MI for two summers while attending GVSU. My projects entailed performing a pilot purification of a DNA polymerase of interest and then working to optimize enzyme activity and conditions in various PCR assays to attempt to match the competitor's products. The skills I obtained while working here include: bacterial cell transformation and cell culture, protein purification techniques such as gravity column chromatography, SDS-PAGE, and FPLC, then learning applications of PCR in industry, creating PCR master mixes, and agarose gel electrophoresis in activity optimization over differing DNA template lengths and conditions.
How did you get the internship?
I first got connected to Fortis through a family friend who ended up being my supervisor while I worked there. However, I still needed to apply by first contacting him and sending him and HR my resume/CV, then interviewing over Zoom with him and a few other team members. The timeline for applying was sending over resumes in January/February, I got contacted for an interview in March, then got offered an internship position at the end of March/early April with an eye of beginning the internship in early May and ending in August.
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