Senior Project I

MBG 491 is where you stop being a student doing prescribed labs and start being a junior researcher embedded in someone's actual project, you pick a faculty or UNAM group, sit down with the PI, and commit to a real question for the semester. The bulk of your time goes into the lab itself: literature search up front to figure out what's already known, then roughly twelve weeks of hands-on experimentation, capped by a written report and a meeting where you defend what you found. It's the first half of the senior thesis sequence that finishes in MBG 492, and it's where everything from your earlier coursework, molecular techniques, genetics, biochem, finally gets pointed at a problem nobody has the answer to yet.