6:30 am, it’s another Tuesday in June. I snoozed my alarm as it went off, afterall I had another hour and twenty minutes until I needed to be up anyway, right?
Wrong. Suddenly I remember I’m not running on school hours anymore, actually it’s day five of SSP. In a regular year, I’d still be in school even if it’s mid-June (yeah, i know… it SUCKS) but lucky for me I get to wake up a whole hour earlier than usual! (Again this also sucks! Mostly because my sleep schedule was already messed up and I need to fix it faster) So, I get up and actually get ready to start my day, eating breakfast (a rarity) and everything.
As I log into Zoom for Dr. Hall’s class, I dreaded the idea of using MOE. The software had been acting up during the TA block before, (s/o to Colin for trying to help me, even if I still had to delete and reinstall the software :/) and surprise surprise it wasn’t working again.
Fortunately, today we’re learning how to run a BLAST test and examine sequences to find similarities! It was all smooth sailing for the most part, my breakout room having a few questions sometimes about the species we were comparing saccharomyces cerevisiae, Brewer’s yeast, to but overall there were no big problems…
Until I had to use MOE. It was fine though, just when I got to that part of the activity we were pulled out of breakout rooms, saved by the bell! Or as close as you can get to an actual bell on zoom?
I think my favorite part was playing fishbowl during our Campus Activity Block. I’ve never been a good actress, but how do you even act out USB-C, NCBI or even colors (smh Yu that was not your best move adding those cards)!? Those were impossible, but we got a good laugh out of it.
During the TA block, we FINALLY got to start working on our research project. The Mighty Membranes (aka Henry, Yu, and I) got to run a BLAST test for our own protein and find similarities between it and other organisms. We got kind of stuck because our sequence on MOE (thanks Henry for presenting your screen, since my MOE software STILL wasn’t working) didn’t match the other protein sequences where our BLAST said it would, but turns out we didn’t align it right and our formatting was weird. Shout out to Henry for catching the copying mistake and to TA Kyle for helping us! All in all, we got over it pretty quickly and it was smooth sailing again!
That being done, we just talked. We had a pretty lengthy conversation about public transportation, paved roads (moral of the story: Texas has nice roads and Chicago is full of potholes) and siblings. It’s insane how comfortable my team has gotten in the span of five days and how ready they are to offer a hand when I need help.
It’s kinda sad that I don’t get to meet them in person, but I’m definitely glad I got to meet them. I can already tell this summer will be one I’ll remember for a long time, both because of my MOE problems (which are fixed now by the way… I just had to reinstall it for a THIRD time) and because of my amazing team.
