Gonzaga Prep senior Will Spencer arrived at the University of Notre Dame last summer with an idea of what cancer research might look like.

In his mind, cancer research meant going into a lab and doing work that helped people. Maybe even saved lives.

Will Schrock arrived with different questions. He wanted to know whether STEM might be part of his future, what he might study in college, and whether Notre Dame itself might be the place for him.

“It would be helpful to determine my major, kind of where I want to go, and whether or not I want to go into STEM,” Schrock, a junior, said. “And also if I want to go to Notre Dame University.”

Eight weeks later, the two Prep upperclassmen had a much clearer idea of what scientific research actually looks like.

Spencer and Schrock were part of the third cohort of scholars in the Ella McKeirnan Memorial Fellowship, an eight-week summer research experience for high school students at Notre Dame's Mike and Josie Harper Cancer Research Institute.

The fellowship has a special connection to Gonzaga Prep. It was created in memory of Ella McKeirnan, a class of 2017 alumna who died in 2020 after being diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. The program honors her resilience, academic excellence, and desire to make a positive impact by giving high school students the opportunity to experience cancer research firsthand.

For Spencer and Schrock, that meant being immersed in life at Notre Dame and in the everyday work of its research labs.

“I was kind of like a graduate student for the summer,” Spencer said.

Spencer worked with principal investigator David Boone and mentor AJ, spending his days doing dissections, embedding sections, taking images, and analyzing them. He also joined other students in reading scientific papers and presenting them to the group.

Schrock was assigned to an immunotherapy lab focused on engineering T-cell receptors. His project was related to kidney cancer, exploring the potential to engineer an immune cell to attack cancer.

He regularly worked with liquid chromatography machines, which separate components of a protein sample and help researchers evaluate its quality. A single run could take as long as 3 hours, with several running each day—into the night—requiring him to change buffers and tend to the machine throughout the process.
“I feel like I was doing one of those at least every day,” he said.

And then, the next day, they came back and did the work again.

Outside the lab, the summer looked a little more like a high schooler's first experience living on a college campus: walks across campus, meals in the dining hall, trips to the gym, and dorm life. Spencer remembers escaping a dorm that was “insanely hot.” Schrock often found his way to Notre Dame’s sand volleyball courts, playing with Notre Dame students sometimes until midnight.

For Spencer, the day-to-day repetition in the lab eventually challenged what he had thought cancer research would be.

The work wasn't about finding the cure for cancer. Researchers might spend years examining a particular protein or pathway, contributing one small piece that might eventually lead to a treatment.

At first, it was difficult to see where he fit into that process.

“I got kind of demotivated and, what am I doing here? What's the point?” Spencer said.

“I'm not really helping anybody. I'm just kind of showing up and doing these experiments and getting little pieces of data, but that's what it's all about.” The little pieces of data were the work.

Spencer began to understand the long path from lab research to helping a patient. Researchers collect and analyze data, share their findings, seek funding to continue the work, and eventually publish results that other scientists can build on. Somewhere farther down that road, the research may help develop a treatment or medicine.

“But it takes a super long time,” he said.

Schrock came away thinking differently about what happens at the other end of that process. He had arrived wondering whether he wanted to pursue STEM. Working in a laboratory gave him a chance to see how classroom science might eventually matter to a patient.

“I think it's changed the way I look at things,” Schrock said. “If I'm learning something, I think more, how could this be applied?”

He finds himself thinking more now about “where does this actually matter?”

For Spencer, the summer also changed how he thinks about a possible future in medicine.

“I've heard this from a lot of different physicians and health professionals,” he said. “They go into their job wanting to save the world, and then they get demotivated by either a lack of progress or just their lack of saving people in the way they want to.”

His own ambitions haven't evaporated, but his understanding of them has changed.

“If I could, I'd save the world today,” Spencer said, acknowledging that realistically, no one can accomplish that.

For Spencer, the lesson eventually extended beyond science.

“I think that also shaped the way that I see my faith as well,” Spencer said.

“The man I want to be takes a day-by-day process of building and being faithful and praying and worshiping every day,” Spencer said. “It's not like you snap your fingers and it's one prayer. I mean, God can do anything, but really he works in the mundane and through little processes.”