Swamped

So... I completely missed yesterday’s post.  I’m going to attribute it to the fact that until this week, I had no idea what ‘swamped’ feels like.  (This is a little untrue... I felt pretty swamped the last two times I said I felt swamped. But this week has the added bonus of being the first time I’m swamped this year while actually having classes and things, so there’s a whole level that was missing before.)  Given the fact that I’ve got lots of things that need to be done, and an ever decreasing window of time to do them in, I’m going to run through some brief updates and then go make breakfast or work on a pset or something productive.

Classes:

I had my first set of psets due last week... I actually finished them well ahead of the due dates, but they were hard.  I’ve formed a pset group of people outside my friend group, which isn’t really something that’s happened before, so that’s new. But 20.320 is a class that requires a pset group, as those psets are often difficult to understand, let alone do.  (Also, pset = problem set, which is what we call our weekly homework assignments).  I wrote my first Spanish essay last week, about the movie ‘Bienvenido Mr. Marshall’, which translates to ‘Welcome Mr. Marshall’.  It was the longest essay I’ve ever written in Spanish, which was kind of cool.  We’re getting them back in class today though, so I don’t know how I did yet.

UROP:

Because we had a student holiday last Friday, I ended up going into lab and doing a full day worth of work, which was pretty cool.  It allowed me to have enough time to transfect various fluorescent gene into some immortalized cells.  Basically, we use electricity to poke holes in the cell membranes, and then put DNA that codes for a colored fluorescent protein on top, and magically the cells incorporate that DNA and fluoresce under the right conditions.  I use the term magic because that’s literally how my grad student described the process to me... as I get further in classes and UROP things, it seems to me that there’s more and more that we actually are just making up as we go along when it comes to biology.  Which is cool, because it means there’re still things to figure out.  Anyway, on Friday, after transfecting the cells and preparing them accordingly, we took them to the FACS (Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting) machines in one of the other buildings on campus, and applied lasers to them to make them fluoresce in different colors, which was pretty cool.

Choir:

Verdi is a very challenging composer.  He writes beautiful scores, but he has some interesting ideas about arrangements that make singing his pieces something of a challenge.  We’re singing Verdi’s ‘Te Deum’ and ‘Stabat Mater’, both of which I’ve linked to YouTube videos of if you click on the name of the song. They’re 10 or 15 minutes long each, though, so make sure you have time if you want to listen. :P

Non-school-things:

It’s getting colder here... I’m starting to need a jacket outside, rather than just in the overly-air conditioned MIT buildings.  On Saturday evening, we went to a free performance by the Boston Ballet Company, which was cool. We got there a little late, so we were extremely far away, but there were screens, so we could see what was going on. The performance was outside on the Boston Common, and later in the evening, so it got chilly enough that we left at the intermission.

Anywho, I’m off to eat breakfast before my first class now, and then I’m going to start working on yet another pset... because the busy-ness never stops.  Luckily, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

Working for Change

            Most of this week consisted of normal, day-to-day activities, like going to classes and doing ridiculous amounts of work, and cooking food. As a result, I’m going to just give a quick update about my UROP, and then I’m going to have a more serious post.

            So my UROP. As I said last time, I’m working in the Samson Lab again this semester, but on a different project from what I was doing over the summer. On Thursday of this week, I was able to actually get back in the lab and do things, which was awesome (I haven’t been in lab for the first two weeks of school because of scheduling conflicts, both on my part and my grad student’s part). I mixed some fluorescent plasmids (circular DNA that codes for proteins that will fluoresce under certain conditions) in varying combinations, and then transfected those plasmids into mammalian cells. On Friday, we went over to the Koch Institute to use their FACS (Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting) machine. The idea behind this machine, in very simple terms, is that you’ve created fluorescent cells of different colors, and the machine is able to sort those cells based on what color they fluoresce at. It’s a really cool process, and I’m excited that I’ll be working with it more over the course of this semester.

            Okay, so now the more serious part. I feel like part of growing up is realizing who you are and becoming the person you want to be. I, for one, am really good at the first one, and not so great at the second one. One day last year, after hearing a particularly inspiring lecture about advances in medical technology and the fact that scientists had developed a method of basically building a human heart, I came home and told my friends, “Guys- we’re going to change the world”. I meant it in the sense that our generation is going to develop most of the advances in science and technology that we’ll see in the future, but I think it’s true in the individual sense as well. There are so many things that we’re going to see in the future simply because someone that we know (to varying degrees) created it.

            Changing the world, or even changing things on a smaller scale, requires a substantial amount of commitment though. And sometimes, it’s a lot easier to know what you want to change than to actually find the commitment to change it. I’m specifically thinking about myself and being out of shape in this case. I was on a run yesterday, and contemplating the fact that nine months ago, the 3 miles that I ran would have been a snap, especially given how slow I was going. It’s so easy to prioritize everything else I have going on, that I often make excuses and forget about exercising regularly or eating as healthily as I could. While I’m certainly not making a diet of Cheetos and soda, I still often choose the easier option of a quesadilla or grilled cheese sandwich rather than taking the time to make something more balanced.

            Five-and-a-half years of rowing did a couple of things for me. First, it gave me pretty much a constant endorphin high, so not rowing last semester meant that I needed to adjust to having a slightly altered brain chemistry. For those of you not familiar with either neuroscience or me after a particularly hard workout, endorphins have the effect of producing feelings of well-being and happiness. As a result, the lack of endorphins meant that I was a little bit grumpy all the time, since my brain wasn’t constantly producing chemicals that made me happy. I’ve equilibrated now, but I still miss having the endorphin high every once in a while. As a result, I’ve realized that I’m a much easier person to live with when I exercise regularly, so I’m going to try to be better about making it a priority. Some of my friends have a goal to go to the gym every weekend, and I think I’m going to join them in that goal. I’ll probably run outside until it’s too cold to do so, but I’m going to try to get some amount of exercise in each week.

            The second thing that rowing for five-and-a-half years did for me was allow me to eat whatever I wanted, without worrying about the consequences. I know that someone reading this right now is probably shaking their head and thinking that I look fine, and to be honest, I look pretty much the same as I have since high school, largely because my body has just replaced any muscle that once was with softer tissues. But it’s less about how I look and more about how I feel that I look. I realize that this sounds like a totally subjective measure, and it is. But it’s a subjective measure that’s important to me. While I haven’t really done anything previously about it, I’m going to make an actual effort this time. In addition to my exercising regularly goal, I’m going to give up sweets, with the exception of sorbet (because I can pretend that that’s not *so* bad for me) and holidays. Last time I gave up sweets, I tried to do it cold turkey, which didn’t lead to success. I think this time I’ve given myself enough leeway that I’ll have a more significant shot at actually being successful.

            This post was kind of a weird one, I realize. But part of the college experience is growing up, and I think for me that means that I have to get serious about working for the things I want to change. I’m still in school, so I’ve got a little bit of time before I can go out and change the world. I’ve still got a lot to learn, after all. But one thing that’s within my power to change right now is myself, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to do what I could in that respect. I’ll get around to changing the world soon enough- right now I’m just going to become the best person I can be.

Nerdy Excitement

            On a video series that I sometimes watch (VlogBrothers, on YouTube, for those of you who want specifics (and also for the appropriate citations... HNA taught me well. :P )) one of my favorite quotes is as follows: “[N]erds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it”. As a self-proclaimed nerd (an epithet which is often lovingly confirmed by those around me) I get really, really excited about things that most people probably wouldn’t. Things like a new book, or nerdy TV shows (*cough* Doctor Who *cough*), or my new class schedule make me a little bit ridiculously excited. It’s probably easiest to just give you a run down of my classes and then go over the other things I did this week. So, without further ado, here is my first weekly blog post of Junior Year.

Note: I’m going to try to not use MIT-speak too much... but it’s kind of hard, since in a lot of cases, I only know what class I’m in by referring to the number, not the name. If I slip, or forget to explain something, feel free to email me or leave a comment (sorry, I know comments still only work for some of you... I’m working on that) and I’ll explain as soon as possible.

7.03 (Genetics): I’m excited about this class purely because I love the subject matter. The human genome contains a massive amount of information that our body uses every day, but we still have very little knowledge (relatively speaking) of how exactly everything works. We know a lot more now that we did, say, 50 or 60 years ago, but in the grand scheme of things there’s still a lot to be discovered. I think it’s incredibly fascinating that each one of our cells contains a wealth of almost entirely untapped knowledge. The answers to the questions of the universe might not lie within our cells... but at the same time they might, since we don’t know everything that’s there yet.

20.109 (Laboratory Fundamentals in Biological Engineering): This is the Course 20 lab class. This semester, we’re genetically engineering a plasmid to glow when DNA repair occurs, doing something with tissue engineering and systems biology that I didn’t really understand during the brief overview of the class last week, and using biomaterials to engineer a solar panel. No big deal. The one downside to this class is that my lab section goes until 5 o’clock on Fridays, so I have something of a long day before the weekend. It sounds like it’s going to be really cool though, so I’m excited anyway.

20.320 (Analysis of Biomolecular and Cellular Systems): This class is just insanely cool. The goal of the class is essentially to learn how to model biological systems on the computer so that we can do quantitative analysis of the systems without running various long, boring experiments in lab. By the end of the class, we’ll have completed a design project that will allow us to model a given biological system and play with the variables such that we can determine the weak points in the system, and understand how changing the variables will affect the system as a whole. The professor told us on the first day that the design project itself is about 100 hours worth of work, and we have p-sets (problems sets, which are MIT’s version of homework) on top of that. This is almost certainly going to be my hardest class, and probably one of the ones with the most work. But it’s so cool (at least in my opinion) that I have trouble grumbling about how much work it’s going to be. I’m sure I’ll revise that opinion later in the semester, once I start actually doing the work. :P

21F.713 (Advanced Communication in Spanish: Film, Visual Arts, and Fiction): Since this class is taught entirely in Spanish, it’s probably more appropriate to refer to it by its Spanish name (Cultura española a traves del cine, which means Spanish Culture Through Film). However, I think my readership would probably appreciate it if I don’t throw speaking Spanish into this blog post on top of the MIT-speak that I’m trying to keep to a minimum, so I’m going to refrain from mixing too many different languages into this post. Suffice it to say, basically what I’m going to be doing in this class is watching one film a week, and examining what that film shows us about the culture of Spain or Latin America. There are a lot of presentations throughout the semester, so hopefully I’ll be decently good at speaking Spanish by the end.

21M.401 (Concert Choir): This one is less of a class, and more just for fun, but I’m really looking forward to it. As the title suggests, it’s a concert choir. There’s somewhere between 50 and 80 people in it, depending on the semester. Last week was Rosh Hashanah, so not everyone showed up to practice, so I’m not entirely sure how many people are in it this semester. We’re singing two pieces by Verdi and one by Beethoven, and we’ll actually be able to sing all four parts, which is a definite change from my all-girls high school, where we were limited to only the Soprano and Alto parts. I’m excited to be able to take a break from classes and work for a little while each week. Hopefully it’ll help me get a bit better at balancing things.

I’m also going to be working at Burton Conner desk, like I did last year, and I’m UROPing again in the Samson lab at MIT. We’re working on a different project now though- we’re trying to confirm the accuracy of a test of glycosylase activity (glycosylases are DNA repair proteins). Basically what we’ll be doing is immortalizing different tissue lines, so that we can test the levels of DNA repair and determine the amount of repair. The end goal is to create a test for glycosylase activity that can be performed using one type of tissue. Glycosylase activity levels are important because they can signal predispositions for cancer risk, so being able to screen people for glycosylase activity could provide them useful information about their health.

The other exciting things I did this week were going to a play (Avenue Q) and going out to dinner with some friends. The play was put on by MIT’s Musical Theater Guild, and it was pretty funny, in my opinion. For dinner, we went to a pho (Vietnamese soup) restaurant in Harvard Square, which was delicious, as pho usually is. I also bought a new backpack on that adventure, because the zipper on mine broke. I have to say, I’m not really looking forward to being an adult if everything costs so much... luckily, the backpacks were 50% off, so they were much cheaper than the original prices, but the original prices were massive! I don’t know why a backpack needs to cost upwards of $90... but I’m not the one making them, so who knows. :P

            That’s about it for this week... and my desk shift is almost over, so I’m going to sign off for now. I hope that everyone has a wonderful Monday!

Do All the Things

            If anything, this week was even crazier than last week. Actually, I guess the week as a whole wasn’t that bad... it’s just the individual days that were insane. Which I guess makes the week rather insane. Okay... I’m going to stop trying to decide whether my week was crazy or not, and just tell you about it. You can draw your own conclusions. :)

            On Monday, I was conscripted into the West Campus ‘Water Wars’ team (and I somehow managed to get my friends conscripted as well... sorry guys). It all began when one of my friends who lives on the floor came looking for someone who knows how to use a circular saw. Being unfamiliar with the proper names for power tools, I said that I knew how to use one. (I have used power saws before, but generally only table saws and miter saws, neither of which I knew the appropriate name for until just now, and both of which I assumed could be circular saws, since they have circular blades. My father is probably hitting his head against a wall right now. :P ) Anyway, we figured out how circular saws work, and I ended up cutting about 25 or 30 pieces of wood to be used as shields during the Water War. We then somehow ended up painting said pieces of wood... and drilling holes in them to attach ropes... and attaching the ropes. We also ended up filling water balloons, carrying things over to the field, and eventually actually fighting in the Water War.

            Water War is something of an MIT tradition that takes place during Freshman Orientation every year. The West Campus dorms fight the East Campus dorms. It’s more or less a foregone conclusion that East Campus will win, if only because they manage to drum up more participants each year. The basic idea is to get the other team as soaking wet as possible, by throwing water balloons, or shooting homemade squirt guns, or dumping buckets of water on people. Essentially, you want to soak the other team by using whatever means necessary. This was actually my first year participating in Water Wars, because I was a lame freshman and only really went to the required orientation events. It was pretty exciting, as far as water balloon fights go.

            On Tuesday, I had a really, really long day. It began with buying eight watermelons at the grocery store. Yes, you read that right- I bought eight watermelons. Eight watermelons are surprisingly heavy; getting them back to the dorm was something of a struggle. I did manage it somehow though, and I got one and a half of them cut up before I had to head outside to get the barbecue set up. See, the reason that Tuesday was such a long day was because I was in charge of an eight-hour barbecue for my dorm, to try to get freshmen to come live with us. Don’t ask me why an eight-hour barbecue was necessary... I have zero idea. However, I was put in charge of it, so I spent 8+ hours on Tuesday grilling burgers and running around. I’m very, very grateful to all of my friends who allowed me to conscript them into helping. Without all of them, it’s very likely that it would have been a disaster. (As an example of the disaster potential inherent in this event, I spent the vast majority of the day cooking beef burgers, something that I don’t eat and have never really seen cooked... so if one of my friends hadn’t taught me in the morning what we were doing, there probably would have been some disgusting burgers served.)

            All eight watermelons were eaten fairly quickly, which I don’t find surprising at all (they were delicious). We grilled through lunch, and while there were slow periods, there was almost always someone who wanted a burger, or something that needed doing in order to keep everything running smoothly. We then continued grilling trough dinner time, but we eventually ran out of charcoal and had to stop. Unfortunately, my day wasn’t over at this point, since I was also in charge of a s’mores making event after the barbecue, that was scheduled to run for another four hours. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in my case) it had to be cut short for various reasons. As a result, I was done running events well before midnight, which was something of a relief, because I was exhausted.

            Tuesday was the last day of the REX part of freshman orientation. REX stands for Residential EXploration period, and it’s the time that MIT freshmen have to choose where they’re going to live. They’re temped in a dorm when they get to MIT, and then they can choose whether or not that dorm really fits what they’re looking for once they get here. Once all the freshmen have chosen their official dorms, there’s an in-dorm rooming process that lets them choose which floor best suits them within the dorm. This is especially important in dorms like Burton-Conner, where I live, in which each floor has a fairly unique culture. During the in-dorm rooming process in Burton-Conner, each floor has events intended to showcase some things about the floor, residents of the floor are available for questions, and there’s lots of good food.

            Floor Rush (as the in-dorm rooming process is known in Burton-Conner) is a lot of fun, but it’s also quite a bit of work to set up as an upperclassman. Again, this was a totally new experience for me, since I wasn’t involved in the setup of Floor Rush my freshman year, and I wasn’t back in Boston yet last year. It was fun, but not stress-free, since there were a lot of things to set up in a relatively short amount of time, and then there were three hours of trying to convince freshmen that my floor is the best place for them. I’m not nearly as shy as I was a few years ago, but large-scale social situations are still not really my cup of tea. Luckily, I managed to work around this by timing the people running the obstacle course, which basically allowed me to run a stopwatch and tell people their times, while leaving most of the convincing to the more persuasive members of my floor.

            For various reasons (most involving cleaning and advance planning for the next day, when the freshmen would find out what floor they were on, and we would place them in rooms where we thought they would fit best on the floor) I went to sleep fairly late on Wednesday night/Thursday morning.  And then I had to get up pretty early on Thursday in order to meet our new freshmen... this week had something of a theme of not getting enough sleep. Thursday morning and early afternoon was filled with doing a lot of stuff to get the rooming information for our floor to the appropriate people and corrected in all the places it needed to be corrected. After we were done with that, we had a few hours to take a break and just chill before helping our GRT (Graduate Resident Tutor; the grad student who lives on our floor and is there for advice/cookie making/general helpfulness) make dinner for the freshmen. She had decided on a pizza making event, so the freshmen all made their pizzas in one of the conference rooms in Burton-Conner, and then we brought them upstairs and cooked them, returning them to the freshmen when the pizzas were done. It was a lot of fun, and we got to use some of the leftover dough to make pizzas for ourselves for dinner, which was awesome.

            Friday was the first full day where I didn’t have anything REX or Floor Rush or Orientation related to do... so I slept for a good portion of it. :P On Friday night, a group of friends and I went into Harvard Square to have dinner and celebrate being back together and done with REX things. We went to the Thai restaurant that I had gone to earlier in the summer, and it was delicious once again. It’s definitely going on my list of go-to restaurants.

            On Saturday, I woke up not feeling great, but I had been planning to go running with two of my friends, so I decided I should at least try to do that. It was pretty much an epic fail... first of all, I’m not a very fast runner, even when I’m in top form, so running with these two (both of whom are a good deal faster than me) was maybe not my best plan ever. Additionally, I was having trouble not coughing every time I tried to breathe... so running was maybe not the best idea. I ended up taking a three mile walk, which took more out of me than I can state without being embarrassed. We had planned to go grocery shopping after we got back, but I was wiped out, both because I’m severely out of shape and because of my cold, so I kind of just went back to sleep and took two three hour naps. I more or less hid in my room for the rest of that day, watching awful movies on Hulu (a free internet video streaming site) and sleeping. This recuperation method seemed to work pretty well though, because I definitely felt better after sleeping. My guess is that high stress levels and being ridiculously busy shot my immune system, so that once I finally relaxed a little bit, the evil common cold caught up to me. Not the most scientific explanation, perhaps, but one that makes some amount of sense in this case.

            On Sunday I slept pretty late again, and then spent a good portion of the day setting up my room, something that I hadn’t really done up to that point. It’s not all that exciting... but it is cleaner than it will probably be all year, so I took some pictures (see below) for posterity.

This is my corner of the room- I hung up some pictures above my bed.

The poster you can see to the left of the window is a list of 101 things to do before you graduate from MIT... I've got 57.5 done so far. (The half is because the last one is "Earn your degree" and I'm halfway there, which is utterly bizarre.)

Next week is the start of my Junior year, which is totally ridiculous to think about... I feel so old! Hopefully it will be good though... we’ll see! :D

Also, I mentioned the Revere Beach Sand Castle Contest in one of my previous posts, back in the middle of the summer. I was unable to take pictures of the sculptures because my camera died, but I stumbled across a webpage that had the pictures posted today, so I’m including the link here: http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=78413

I hope everyone has a good week!