Things I Miss, and Things I'm Excited About

As it turns out, I have very little idea what I’m doing with this blog... my life doesn’t seem nearly exciting enough to entertain whoever is taking the time out of their day to read this. Or rather, I find it exciting, but chances are you’re not going to find a detailed description about learning to do a Western blot test particularly interesting. (To be honest, I don’t really find it that interesting either... Western blots are ridiculously finicky and take pretty much forever. There are at least seven pages of instructions on how to perform this one test. The longest protocol I’ve seen previously was about three.) So today, instead of talking about my life, I think I’m going to discuss things I miss from home a bit, and why I’m excited to be here for the summer.

After reading the first post, one of my friends asked if I missed Washington at all. The answer is, of course, that I do! I miss all the people back home who are completely awesome, I miss my puppy (Okay, she’s almost 11, but she’s a puppy at heart), I miss Mom’s cooking, I miss normal weather patterns; In short, I miss a lot of things about Washington. The great thing about Boston though, is that it’s actually a lot like Seattle, so it’s easy to forget about missing the things from home (I still miss the people from home, of course).  There are also a ton of things to do here, so it’s hard to be bored. The rain has put a bit of a damper on exploring in the past week or so, but at some point this summer, I would definitely like to do a bunch of the historic Boston-y things that I’ve somehow been too busy to do in my first two years of college, like walking the freedom trail, and going to see the harbor. Tourist-y stuff. :P

I guess the reason that I’m not always just thinking about home though, is that I’m excited about the things I’m doing here. In high school, my friends and I used to joke about what we were going to do in the world when we were grown ups- mine was always curing some major disease. Granted, I’m just learning lab techniques right now, but a lot of the things I’m doing this summer actually have some potential to help on the path to finding a cure for cancer, or at least understanding cancer better. And that’s incredibly cool, at least in my opinion. What I’m doing may only be one brick in the pathway to curing/understanding cancer, but (to abuse the metaphor) even that one brick will let us walk a little bit further down the path. I’m not trying to brag here... but I’m incredibly excited that I get to help increase the amount of knowledge in the world. So that’s probably what I’m most excited about this summer. :)

My first two years at MIT were challenging on various levels- academically, socially, learning-to-take-care-of-myself-ally. But I hope that I can continue to build on the opportunities that those two years have afforded me. Because right now? Those opportunities are looking pretty awesome.