Hello! As the first participant blogger, I guess I have the privilege of setting the standard for upcoming Purdue Biochem blogs. Very exciting!
I’ll start off with a short and sweet recap of what happened yesterday, which was our very first day at SSP. Check in went pretty smoothly and I was able to settle into my dorm relatively conveniently.
As our first icebreaker event of the day, we went on a scavenger hunt that consisted of finding locations around Purdue. The last item on the list was to find “the letter ‘P,’” which had something to do with Purdue’s mascot Pete, but we were feeling a bit tired and decided to do our own version of finding the “P”…
~ a while later ~
[The next day] After a long series of lectures in the morning, currently, we (Isabelle, Michelle, and I) are waiting in a veryyyyyyyyyyyyy long line to this food place named Soltoro. Someone just defected *ahem* left the line to go to a different place, while we’re stuck here waiting for food, as the clock ticks down and lab time looms closer. I hope we can get food in time. The upside is that SSP gave us these food vouchers to purchase meals with—essentially, money to spend on whatever we want to eat, as long as it’s under a certain price. Our group has plans to try out all of the food locations at the Purdue Memorial Hall. Perhaps I shall buy boba one day if I have extra credit left over.
~Thoughts?~
As I am writing this at the end of a busy first full day of SSP, my first thought is that time passes way quicker than expected! Originally, when I was glancing over the schedule and noticed the 4.5 hours of time to work on the lab, I was slightly intimidated by such a long period of time. However, after we went through the entire procedure of practicing how to do pipetting, making the media solution, and setting up the cell cultures, I realized that we were really immersed in the activities, and before we knew it, many hours had passed.
In addition, all of the TAs and professors were very helpful with the lab, being extremely patient with our incessant questions and requests for help. Special shoutout to my teammates Xuan and William for their unparalleled enthusiasm and dedication towards making sure everything was going well.
Overall, we are having lots of fun and learning a lot, whether that is about biochemistry concepts, or applying what we learned in the lab. As an individual who has gone through more than a year of online learning and has been more-than-deprived of being able to engage in a physical lab setting (as I didn’t take a life science class during junior year), I feel extremely fulfilled to have been able to work with hands-on material, as cliché as it may sound.
I have just a bit more time before our dorm meeting at 7 PM, so I’ll end with some insights from a fellow SSPer who has been here for just one day: *some of these are serious, others are lighthearted ~ I trust your ability to tell between the two 🙂 Also these may or may not be from personal experience.
- Make sure you don’t write with Sharpie onto a flask without writing it on a piece of tape first. If that does happen, ask your TA for help as you see them magically wipe off the seemingly-permanent ink (tysm Jamilla for helping us :D)
- Tryptone smells like cheese.
- When handling the heat plate, make sure you don’t turn the stir function knob the opposite way in order to reach the off sign, such that it reaches 12 and not the 0… otherwise many bad things will happen.
- The past tense of “split” should be splut. Welp, you know that’s not a real word when google docs autocorrects you. Anyway, here is a sample sentence: “We splut the 2xYT solution.”
- I learned a new word today! The term autoclave is basically a fancy word for serializing, and through extreme pressure and/or temperature.
Hello! My name is Victoria and I am one of the many participants from California. In my spare time, I love to play badminton, piano, and crochet while listening to podcasts. At SSP, I try to understand enzyme kinetics, learn new lab techniques, remember how to navigate the Purdue campus without getting lost for the fifteenth time, and do a form of contortion every night as I lean out and try to close the light from my bed.
