I started
this blog over year ago, which is a bewildering fact on its own. Combined with
the fact that I’m now done with my junior year of college, and about a third of
the way through the summer before my senior year, that fact becomes mildly
overwhelming. In large part, that’s why I haven’t written anything for over a
month. Yes, there were finals to contend with, and then I was home for two
weeks, so writing seemed less important. But somewhere in the back of my mind,
the whole time there was this annoying little voice going, “You’re almost an
adult! What are you doing with your life?”
It was
generally pretty easy to ignore when I was home, since I was over 3000 miles
away from what passes as the reality of my life these days. Boston, being the
place where I eat, sleep, work, and study, often seems more like the center of
my ‘real life’ than Seattle does, since I only see Seattle when I’m on
vacation. As a result, while I was home it was fairly easy to ignore the fact
that I have a mountain of things to do in order to be ready for next year and
whatever comes after it.
In
contrast, coming back to Boston meant that I was reminded of everything I need
to do in the coming months- take the GRE (the entrance exam for grad school),
apply to grad schools (which, of course, means that I actually figure out where
I want to apply), my thesis project for course 7 (which will, if all goes well,
essentially require me to become an expert in how DNA repair of certain lesions
works and can be measured), and at some point I also need to finish the rest of
my requirements for my major so that I can graduate (part of which will require
me to relearn how to speak Spanish... no easy task). On top of that, I need to
figure out an alternate plan in case grad school doesn’t work out, I’m still
floor chair for the rest of this year, which means I have to help organize
several things in the coming semester, and I should theoretically find some
time to enjoy my last year of college.
Basically,
all of this is a long way of saying that I haven’t written anything because I
generally try to portray a somewhat positive attitude on this blog, and I spent
a good portion of the last three weeks freaking out, so positivity was a little
difficult to come by.
I think
that I’ve brought the freaking out under control for the moment though, so I’ll
give a brief overview of what I’m doing this summer, and then hopefully the
next blog posts will have exciting things to talk about, so that we can all get
back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Obviously,
I’m back in Boston for the summer, which is great. And for the first time in my
three years of saying I live in Boston, I’m actually
living in Boston. This summer, I’m staying in a fraternity house with my two of
my friends. The fraternity is Sigma Phi Epsilon, and the house is immediately
across the river from MIT. It’s a really nice location, not least because we
have a wonderful view of MIT’s campus, which isn’t something I can really say
that I’ve seen from this side of the river all that much (note to self: I
really should try to get out of Cambridge more next year). I don’t have any
pictures of the house at the moment, but I’ll try to get some soon- I
accidentally put my camera charger cord in storage, and my camera is now dead,
so I have to figure out what to do about that.
The house
is nice so far, although I miss Burton Conner. We’re living on the fourth
floor, and the kitchen is in the basement, which makes it quite a trek to fill
up your water bottle or get a snack. I’m getting used to it though, even if my
motivation is occasionally lacking. On the plus side, the laundry room is right
across the hall from us, so we don’t have to carry laundry downstairs. On the
minus side, this means that our shower loses hot water more often than not,
especially since I have an uncanny knack for deciding to take a shower
immediately before people decide to start washing their clothes. We do have air
conditioning though, which will probably be a total lifesaver when the summer
gets hotter. And the room is a decent size- big enough that we all have our own
space. All in all, the good things more or less outweigh the annoying ones.
This summer
I’m working in the same lab I’ve been in for the past year. Being in lab is
probably the highlight of my life, which is totally dorky and workaholic-ish,
but I really enjoy being in lab. Apparently my PI (the professor who runs my
lab) was talking with my advisor at some point and he told her that I’d never
seemed so happy about anything academic as I do when I’m talking about lab, so
it’s something that’s evident to people other than me. I’m working on an
extension of the project I’ve been doing all year, with some differences in
that we’re moving into ‘uncharted territory’. The grad student I’m working with
is beyond excited about the project, which makes it hard to not be excited as
well. I’m sure I’ll eventually hit some rough patches with the project (reading
scientific papers is my current stumbling block... they’re extremely dense) but at the moment I’m excited about it.
I’ve got a
bit more autonomy in lab these days too. Largely this is because I’ve been
working there for a year, so I kind of know how things work, and people
generally trust me not to go around messing things up. It’s also helped by the
fact that the World Cup is going on, and my grad student is a soccer fanatic
(he’s from Venezuela, so this is mildly unsurprising). He’s actually in Brazil
right now watching some of the games, which everyone is very jealous about. He
left me with a bunch of things to do, but left the timeline of those tasks up
to me, which was rather stressful at first (I spent a good 20+ minutes freaking
out to one of my friends, who told me (correctly) that I was being ridiculous
and should calm down). After the first couple of days, when I realized that
scheduling things out would help a lot, I was much less stressed.
Since I’m
over 1000 words on this post now, and I don’t have any pictures for you to
break it up with, I’m going to pause here, and I’ll write up some of the things
I’ve been doing either later in the week or for next week’s post. Hopefully I’ll
be able to get back on a more regular posting schedule and not make you wait
five weeks between posts again.
Until next time!
Alycia
