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.