Unlike most participants, my Monday work started while it was still Sunday in the United States. I wouldn’t have my first class activity block until 8pm that night, so I had the day (partially) to myself. After a fun weekend with friends and my first chance after school ended to let my hair down, I was ready to fully dive into the difficult content SSP was exposing us to. But before I could check what we were going to do for this week, I had to finish up our weekend work. Luckily, my teammates Anushay and Mika are absolute legends and awesome people all around, so we hopped on a Zoom call and worked in the afternoon to familiarize ourselves with the previous lectures. However, true to our team name Error 404, we had a bunch of tech issues lying in wait to pounce on us every time we thought we could finally get going. Eventually, after a long and hard battle against the secret agents sabotaging us, we finished our work just before the class activity block, with only minutes on the clock to spare.
8 pm rolled around and I hopped on the Zoom call. I would have thought that we’d ease into the lectures, baby steps before running and all, but I was thrown for a bit of a loop when they told us that we were getting started on our project already. After three days of Labster and lectures, I was ready for us to get our grimy virtual hands on some protein structures in MOE. Dr. Hall walks us through the program, teaching us how to manipulate, rotate, and edit the protein sequence.
It was getting late, my coffee was running dry, so to be honest, I definitely spaced out a few times, which would come bite me in the back during the class activity. We broke out into random rooms, but while others in the room moved through the instructions quickly, I productively struggled through the instructions at a snail’s pace. Thankfully, our amazing TAs were quick to respond to our incessant bugging calls for help, making it so much fun to play with the software and manipulate the different parts of the protein structure.
To my surprise, 11pm came quicker than I expected. We took a 15 minute break after the class activity so we were refreshed to jump right back into the campus block. During this time, I took the liberty to expose the MOE protein for what it really was: A sausage dog.
Something about class bonding activities at midnight was reminiscent of sleepovers, where the excitement and serotonin keeps you up till 3 in the morning. So, when I woke up 10 minutes before that TA block on Tuesday morning (or Monday night for people in the States), I was definitely in a state of being a half-asleep zombie. Thankfully, all that was left was to mess around with the beloved Dr. One. (I only just noticed, that spells drone. My mind is blown.) During the Labster, I discovered my new favorite thing: Robots reading out protein sequences.
The clock struck noon and “Monday” was officially over. I’m looking forward to so many more hilarious memories, both with the entire campus and my goofy, lovely team.
