“Time flies when you’re having fun” – anonymous
Today marks the first day of the last full week of SSP. The beginning of the end. During the first week of SSP, one of our TA’s, Miss Alexa, told us that the days would go by slowly, but the weeks would go by quickly. She was right – for the first few weeks. Now, it feels like the days and weeks are flying by, leaving me no time to stand by and enjoy the scenery. Today was no different.
“Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way” – me (perchance)
My breakfast/lunch table is comprised of eight people, an entire third of the program eating and spending quality time with each other. Today, we had three people. Not because there’s beef going on, not because there was a complication or issue, but because five of our eight people were deep in hibernation like the sleepyheads they are. However, Ritisha, Klara, and I made the most of our breakfast, and Klara and I even managed to beat Ritisha in the NYT Mini with a time of 10 seconds!!! (Ritisha actually mogged us but we don’t talk about that)
How do antibiotics like to spend their time? Peni-chillin’!
Today was marked by a lack of lab time. Our schedule was filled to the brim with lectures, notifying us of an informational, yet unremarkable day ahead. However, our “lectures” turned out to be embedded with lots of time to work on our posters and papers, giving us some academic freedom in the lecture room. Before we got to working, however, Dr. Duffy announced that the company that sequenced our genomes had not sent us our raw genome reads, so we would have to use the polished, clean reads that they had already assembled for us instead. We were very sad and devastated at the news that we wouldn’t have to spend more time using Galaxy. Another announcement we found out about the genome reads was that out of the two control genomes that were sent for sequencing, one of them had been mislabeled and was actually from a vial with antibiotic. This meant that there was only one applicable control genome remaining, and it was a genome extracted from my group’s vial! This means that my group, Penichillin, will be on everyone else’s paper as an acknowledgement 😌. Common Penichillin W tbh.
If I had a nickel for every time I learned an official Kpop dance with a group of nerds, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Lunchtime was as usual – from 11:15 to 12:45. Today, we decided we needed to get on the grind. So after devouring our lunch, Klara, Angelina, Arion, and I headed back to the Piñon Hall common room for an intensive practice session. It was finally time to lock in and learn the dance for Magnetic, a Kpop song by the group Illit. We’d previously practiced the choreo for the first chorus of the song, but obviously that isn’t good enough for the talent show. While the dance is definitely difficult, I listened to the wise wise words of Justin Bieber and never said never. As I like to say, anything is possible if you just believe in yourself.
“Let me show you how to blast” – Ritisha Dey
Our afternoon was spent doing two things: our problem set and BLASTing. NCBI’s BLAST feature may be really useful, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make me want to drop out of school and become a Twitch streamer. We spent hours trying to figure out how to use BLAST, along with Galaxy, to find the mutations in our genomic sequences. Tears were shed, despair was rampant, and our hopes and dreams were being crushed. However, after many iterations of BLASTing, we had a semblance of a start to our genomic analysis process (special shoutout to Ritisha for being a master blaster and helping out). The light at the end of the tunnel was getting brighter, and when we found our first relevant mutation in DNA gyrase, we discovered how Newton felt when he invented gravity for the first time (isn’t it crazy how people survived without gravity before Newton invented it?).
“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” – Also me, perhaps
Today was exceedingly average. We didn’t have an exciting field trip, a birthday, a shopping run, or a movie. However, it’s these days that portray the true essence of SSP. The days we spend at the mall, White Sands, or the baseball game will stand out, but each day that passes where we laugh and joke while we work on Galaxy, each day where we blast music in the study room, and each day where we look up at the moon while walking and talking on the way to the dorm are invaluable.
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” —Theodor Seuss Geisel
