Hi! It’s Suwen from Maryland, and it’s finally Saturday! This week has held a variety of confusing, weird, and fun things for the Genomics program– much like the Target store we were set loose upon this afternoon. As such, I thought it would be fitting to take a look through our shopping list.
- A 28-seat bus
- Let’s take a quick peek at the IU campus and make some observations about our situation here. First: our dorms. Eigenmann is a 14-floor x-shaped building containing 24 SSP participants, 4 TAs, and a seemingly infinite number of swim kids. Now, pan over to the biology building, a short 1-mile walk away. Just a short 20 minutes of walking. Multiple times a day. Truly, genomics is a 2-in-1 Summer Walking-Science Program. As much as we enjoy our position as the program with the most steps, it would be nice to get transportation, especially since the TAs told us that we can’t ride the scooters.
- Unpoppable, uncontaminatable tubing
- So, our project involves growing bacteria in vials which are fed media by tubes. These tubes must be completely sterile, which means that the insides must never touch the outside air. In theory, it’s pretty easy to keep them sterile, as the tubes are part of a closed system; in practice, the average number of times each lab group has had to re-sterilize and restart is about four. So, if you find yourself experiencing despair, stress, heart palpitations, screaming, and facepalming, you may be a lab group whose tubing has just popped. Jokes aside, though, everyone here is extremely resilient and forgiving. I might have given up for the day on our third autoclave, but my teammates kept me going and our experiment is running (for now)! Update: tubes popped; our experiment is no longer running.
- More sleep
- Between lab work, Jenga, problem sets, lab notebooks, hanging out, dinner, socializing, and walking, I’ve really learned how little sleep I can function on. The answer? 6.5 hours. I used to be a 8.5-hour sleeper. Life-changing. But seriously, with so many things to do, maybe what we really need to buy is more hours in a day. Feels like a problem for astro to look into…
- Thank you cards
- Thank you, V. natriegens, for being non-pathogenic. Thanks, autoclave, for being there when the tubing wasn’t. Gracias dining halls for providing ice cream. Merci beaucoup Trinity for forgiving me for messing with her experiment. I am grateful for Carson mediating the dinner table, for Madeline getting us to speed-walk everywhere, for Jillian working the autoclave, and for Alvin taking us to the bus stop instead of making us walk back. My lab group has my gratitude for always persisting through the hardest of times. And cheers to Dr. M and Dr. D for stopping us from making the bio building a giant biohazard, for waging war on our chemostat for us, and for their patience with our sleepiness.
- Boba
- I know you’re reading this, TAs. Are you gonna let biochem have boba and not us??
(Here are some more pictures from Friday Fun Night)




