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.