Welcome to Spring! (Spring semester, anyway...)

            Welcome to Spring semester, 2014. I’ve now completed 5 semesters at MIT, which means there are only three semesters left of college. Which is more than a little bizarre. In two semesters, I’ll be applying to grad schools. And in three semesters, I’ll be a ‘real adult’ (as far as grad students and/or entry-level-job-holders are real adults). But... that’s two or more semesters away, and while I definitely need to start planning that stuff now, I also have to focus on the fact that it’s a new semester, so there are new classes to contend with. Which means another classes explanation post! Your favorite, I know. But I’ll probably slip and refer to one of my classes by number at some point this semester, so it’ll be good to have a reference. (Especially since I, yet again, can’t remember what some of my classes are actually called. I’ll be googling that once I get to it. :P ) So here, in numerical order, are my classes for the semester!

7.06 (Cell Biology)

            As the title suggests, this is a class about cell biology. We’ll learn about how cells signal things, both within a cell and to the surrounding cells, what happens during various cellular processes, and the experimental basis for various discoveries, among other things. Honestly, this class sounds fairly dry... but we had a couple of really awesome demonstrations on Tuesday during the first lecture. Apparently GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) fluoresces if you shine a blue/UV light on it, which I didn’t know. And if you introduce the gene that codes for that protein to a fish’s DNA, you can get fish that glow when you shine the light on them. Which looks really cool in a totally dark classroom. (In fairness, I totally knew that this would happen... I’d just never seen it in practice before, so I was mildly amazed by the results)

20.310 (Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Biomechanics)

            If any class is going to kill me this semester, I’m going to put an early bet on it being this one. We started off relatively easily, just going over practical examples of how, say, the length of a heartbeat compares to how long a single blood cell takes to circulate your body (For reference, it’s about one second and one minute, respectively). But we’ll be delving much deeper, in what I suspect is a very short time period. We’re going to get into exactly what forces are at work on molecules, cells, and tissues- how and why they move the way they do, and why things bond. Basically, it’s going to be a crazy amount of physics combined with biology... definitely not my strong point. And the professors made a point of the fact that no other school teaches a class like this, so that should be fun. MIT does always know how to make things interesting! :P

20.330 (Fields, Forces, and Flows in Biological Systems)

            This class is also going to be extremely difficult. As far as I can tell, it’s an extension of the previous class, with more of a focus on the forces behind what happens in the body. So at the very least, the two classes will cooperate with each other, I guess. But they’re both very math heavy, and math isn’t really one of my strong points. Which means that I’ll be doing a lot of review of math things, and outside work in order to make sure that I have the concepts down to do the psets and exams. I think I’m going to need to come up with a new song playlist for when I’m studying for these classes, so if anyone has any good song recommendations, you should comment and/or send them to me. I’m especially fond of anything without lyrics or in languages other than English or Spanish, since then I can’t be distracted by the lyrics. This probably severely limits the number of song recommendations people could give me, but it’s worth a shot. :)

20.URG (UROP for credit)

            I’m continuing my UROP this spring, which is good. My class schedule is actually significantly lighter than in previous terms, so I’ll have more consecutive blocks of time to devote to research. Since UROPing for credit serves as both a GPA boost and a good way to continue gaining research experience, this is awesome. I haven’t done many exciting things yet this term, but I do have to give a short presentation to my PI (Principle Investigator- the professor who’s the head of the lab) next week. So that’s exciting. I don’t really have any results to show her yet, since most of the cells we were working on for the past few weeks decided to die on us. So... I’m not really sure what I’m going to present to her. But I’m drafting a presentation for next Monday, and my grad student is going to help me revise it. Hopefully, we’ll come up with something that’s actually presentable.

21W.764 (The Word Made Digital)

            This is my humanities class for the semester. It counts for my Art credit, which I’m happy to finally be fulfilling. It sounds like a really cool class as well, although it’s probably going to be a substantial amount of work. The focus is on how computers and new technology are influencing art forms, particularly literary art. Today in class we looked at some computer programs that generated poetry or short stories. (The links are to examples of those, written by my professor. Both pages also have a link to the Python code that generates the work, if you're interested in looking at that.) There are four units in the class, and for each unit we’ll be writing a short program that generates or interacts with a written work. The first one is writing a program that generates a piece of poetry or a story, like the link above. The programming itself shouldn’t be too difficult (hopefully, knock on wood), but the analysis of the pieces that we’re going to look at requires thinking in a totally different way than I have before, so it’s not going to be intuitive at all. The first class was really interesting though, so I’m excited.

Other things

            In addition to my classes, I’m also officially co-floor chair beginning this semester. This means that, among other things, I’m working with Michelle, the other co-floor chair, to organize floor events, reimburse people for study breaks and things, and generally make sure things run as smoothly as possible. Last week, we organized a Super Bowl party on the floor. I was very excited when the Seahawks won! (Although not nearly as excited as some of the other people on my floor... and they aren’t even from Seattle. We’ve got some extremely avid football fans. :P ) We’ll also be organizing a dance, some floor-wide games, inter-floor activities with the other floors in Burton Conner, and eventually rooming decisions. There are probably some other things we’ll have to organize, but they’re escaping me at the moment. There are more things we need to do next semester, but they’re pretty far in the future.

            We got about a foot of snow over the past day, which was pretty exciting. It made getting to class a bit of an adventure, especially since it’s a lot faster for me to get to all of my classes by walking outside than to go through the buildings. I ended up tromping through about 6 inches of snow this morning on the way to class, and a few inches of slush on the way home, since the walks had mostly been cleared. I forgot to pack my extra shoes in my backpack this morning, so I had to walk around in snow boots all day. This wasn’t the end of the world... but my feet were extremely warm.

            That’s pretty much all that’s new over here. I’m sure there will be more fun details to add about classes as we actually get into the semester. And possibly more snow adventures! We’re supposed to get a blizzard on Sunday and Monday, according to one of the post docs in my lab. That will be exciting, I’m sure. :)