Summer 2014 (Or, One Year Later)

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