Finished with the GRE!

The highlight of this week (or lowlight, depending on how you look at it) was the GRE.  As I’ve said before, the GRE is basically the SAT on steroids- the question types are similar, but the difficulty is ramped up several notches.  Over the course of the summer, I learned almost 400 vocabulary words (and was reminded of the meanings of several others that I’ve used or seen before, but didn’t quite know the definition of), reminded myself of how to do basic math problems (will I ever learn probability? The world may never know...), and re-learned how to write a halfway decent essay in half an hour.  The culmination of this studying was a four and a half hour exam this Saturday.  Finishing was rather anticlimactic, but there are very few things in my life that I’m happier about being done with than the GRE.  Given a couple more months I could possibly do better, but it wouldn’t be cost-effective, so I think that I’m done with the test from ‘H-E-double hockey sticks’, as my siblings would say.  Now I can get back to fun stuff like figuring out exactly what it is that I’m doing with the rest of my life.... yay! :P

Anyways, I did do things other than take a horribly long exam this week... not many of them, but they were rather exciting things, so I’ll tell you about those rather than continuing to complain about the GRE. (And at this point all of the people reading this let out a mental cheer... :P)

On Monday my experiment failed.  I haven’t had any major failures this summer yet, so this was a good return to the old standby of having things not work the way I wanted them to. So, with an entire day’s worth of work down the drain, I started it over on Tuesday, with some minor changes to the protocol that were aimed at resolving the issue.

Tuesday’s experiment worked out fine, luckily.  And since Tuesday’s worked out well, I got to do the same thing on Wednesday, just in triplicate.  Which is always so much fun to try to coordinate, let me tell you.  Somehow doing things in triplicate doesn’t have a linear relationship with time... it’s more of an exponential relationship.  Everything took about nine times as long as it should have, which was great fun.

Wednesday also resulted in a rather fun story that really wasn’t all that fun at the time.  In order to understand it, I’m going to remind everyone that a microcentrifuge (often just called a centrifuge because we’re lazy about names :P) is a little box that you stick your samples in and it spins them around really fast to make solids fall out of solution, or various other applications. We have them sitting on top of our work benches- they’re pretty small.  Anyway, I was doing a protocol that requires you to spin your samples down approximately every two minutes after adding different chemicals.  I’d been just sticking my samples into the centrifuge and turning back to my work on my bench, which normally works just fine.  I’ve always got half an ear turned to the centrifuge though, since it sounds different when it’s speeding up or slowing down, and that lets me know when my samples are almost done.

The centrifuge made its speeding up sounds, and I went to get things ready for the next step in the protocol.  Not 30 seconds later though, it started making slowing down sounds, and then sped back up.  This is not standard procedure for centrifuges- they’re supposed to get up to speed and stay there until the time is up.  It got back up to speed okay though, so I let it continue through the step, and decided it must have just been an aberrant spin. [Note the use of aberrant there... that’s one of the 400 words that I learned. :P]  When I was doing the next spin step though, the centrifuge got up to speed, and then it sort of began slowing down and all of the lights on top began flashing.  I couldn’t stop the rotor, and the door wouldn’t open, so my samples were stuck inside.  And since my grad student was missing (he’s been spending a ridiculous amount of time doing flow cytometry, which is in another building altogether) I was sort of freaking out.  I eventually got my head together enough to Google the problem, at which point I found the user manual and found what the problem was.  Unfortunately, the fix to the problem was in French.  And I was spending a good deal of mental energy freaking out about the fact that my samples were stuck in the centrifuge, so it didn’t immediately occur to me that the power of the Internet would be able to translate the manual for me... (I was alternating between trying to find French/Spanish cognates and trying to remember if anyone in lab spoke French... not the most logical moment in my life).

I eventually got to the point where I translated the instructions and followed them (it was literally turn off the centrifuge and turn it on again... I really should have guessed).  And supposedly that should have fixed the centrifuge.  So I got my samples out and ‘fixed’ the centrifuge, did the next step, and put my samples back into the centrifuge to do the next spin step.  And the same thing happened.  This time I knew what to do, so my freaking out was significantly more under control, but it was still annoying.  Especially since my lab has a running joke that I’m the one who breaks things... the last thing I wanted to do was prove them right. :P

I reset the centrifuge again, and then decided to just use the other centrifuge for the rest of the day.  I reset the centrifuge again afterward, and did some test spins with empty sample tubes that seemed to work fine.  So I decided that the centrifuge just hated me, and was actually okay.  Of course, I was wrong.  (Anyone surprised?)  The centrifuge threw a tantrum again on Thursday when I was trying to spin down Thursday’s set of samples.  My grad student was in lab this time though, so I was able to get his opinion on what to do.  Not that that helped much, since his advice was literally ‘turn it off and on, and we’ll fix it tomorrow’.  But it was nice to know that I wasn’t crazy.

The saga of the centrifuge was probably the most exciting thing that happened last week... I took Thursday afternoon and Friday off (on a somewhat involuntary basis... my grad student sort of sent me home to study for the GRE).  I spent a large portion of that time studying, which worked out fairly well, other than the fact that I ended up having a laughing fit on Friday evening because I over-studied a tiny bit.  My friends were, once again, slightly worried for my sanity.  Not that that’s all that unusual, to be honest.  People are worried for my sanity on a worryingly frequent basis. :P

Saturday morning went pretty well.  My friend and I went to brunch before the GRE, and I had a delicious breakfast burrito (another wonderful restaurant for anyone in Boston to try- Trident Booksellers Café. It’s a bookstore and a café, also known as heaven).  Then we spent four and a half hours sitting at a computer screen taking an exam, which was great fun, of course.  And afterwards, we went out to eat again (this time I got Mexican food at Cactus Club- another delicious meal).  And when we were done with that, we got cheesecake with a third friend who took the MCAT this week as well.  It was an episode of stress eating, but it was pretty delicious.

On Sunday I went for a run in the morning, and then my friends and I trekked out to Revere Beach to spend the afternoon.  It could have been a bit warmer, but the beach was lovely.  I went in the water for the first time all summer, and the tide was farther out than I’ve ever seen it on this coast.  We saw hermit crabs, and found lots of shells, and spent a good deal of time in the sun (no sunburns though, due to some possibly overzealous sunscreening).  It’s late in the summer to be going to the beach, but it’s definitely a better late than never situation.  And it was a great way to round out the summer... it was sort of the last weekend of the summer, since next weekend I’ll be moving back into Burton Conner, and then it’ll be Orientation for the new freshmen, and then school will be starting.  So, all in all, this was an excellent ‘end’ to the summer, even if there’s about two weeks left technically.

This time next week though, I’ll be back in Burton Conner, with my stuff back, and a full kitchen on the same floor as me, and it will be lovely.  Did I mention I’m excited to go back to Burton Conner?  I’m just a little bit excited. :P  Until then!