By Rishabh S.
Today marked T minus 1 week ish till the end of SSP, and personally, it’s crazy to me how fast the weeks have flown by. We started off the fine Tuesday with Micah attempting to explain the game Codenames over his rapid firing Discord notifications. Honestly, my group had no idea how the game worked, so like pretty much everything else at SSP, we decided to figure it out as we went. After a few turns, (and Alor trying to bend the spymaster rules) we all got the hang of it and had a jolly fun time trying to make connections between random groups of words.
During our class activity block, we had about 15 minutes to finish our Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Talks, which we were to present later in the block. My group hurriedly put our internet research onto slides and made a somewhat cohesive presentation on the cancer drugs Imatinib, Bosutinib, Ponatinib (Who decided to make these drugs so unpronounceable man). Quick shout out to Helen and Judy for carrying the MOE portions of the project.
“Why was the mushroom invited to the party? Because he was a fun guy”- Alex Gu randomly in the middle of class activity. After all the groups had completed their wonderful presentations, my research group and I set plans for what we were going to during TA Block, and then we bid farewell for 3 hours.
During the break between Class Activity and TA, I spent some time sleeping, eating, and shooting some hoops with friends. Pretty solid evening.
Finally, late TA Block! The time when half asleep teenagers use their collective 5 brain cells to make things happen! Today, my group and I learned about X Ray Crystallography, which for some reason to me felt overly complicated, but at the end of the day it gets the protein imaged which is what matters.
Finally, we ended the night with some Excel/Sheets work. We used data from previous, in person SSP years to determine the Kcat/Km value (essentially the higher this value, the better the substrate is for the enzyme) for possible phosphopeptide substrates for our enzyme. Honestly doing this assignment made me realize how far our spreadsheet skills had come over the course of the program. I feel like if we had done this assignment at the beginning of the program, the excel work could have taken hours, but today we were able to get it done in about 45 minutes.
This last week of SSP is going to be a real grind, but I think it’ll be a fun one. Crazy to think that a week from now we’ll have a completed paper and a month of stimulating biochem research and countless laughs behind us.
