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!