Hey again, this is Saheli! I’m a rising senior in the Chicago area and I’m interested in genetics, service, Spanish, and teaching.
Friday was a day packed with work and emotions. We began the day at midnight, all singing happy birthday to Andrea during the first minute of her special day! After minimal sleep, we all began in the lab, setting up our natural transformations. The wet lab work was fairly easy, but it was all stressful as we didn’t want any contamination or to mess up our samples. It’s amazing to think that by just by doing a bit of pipetting we were able to take DNA and put it into a cell to genetically modify it. Anyways, aside from the wet lab time and working on our manuscripts and posters, there were many fun moments. Throughout the day, I made it a point to say happy birthday to Andrea as much as possible. During lunch, we all sang happy birthday in the middle of the dining hall, which was pretty great. We did the same again at dinner. After dinner, we moved onto game night/talent show practice, or so we thought. It turned out that one of our TAs (Alvin) had made a puzzle representing our summer that had all of our faces. The puzzle was 1024 pieces, and we spent the whole time putting it together. I think everyone is going to have back problems for the next week because of the time we spent bending over the puzzle. Once the puzzle was made, we all took a part to keep, reminding us of how we work together and how there will always be pieces missing. That almost made me cry. As we near the end, we are all sad that we will soon be gone, but we will all carry with us the special memories we have made here and the friendships we will carry forever. Oh, and also there was a cockroach in the dorm and Sydney very kindly saved it and released it back outside.
