NMSU Genomics – Day 5: Ritisha’s Birthday Blog Post

Hello fellow SSPers! My name is Ritisha and I’m excited to tell you about my wonderful day yesterday, whether you like it or not… (insert mischievous grin here).

First, I woke up at the late, late time of 6:45 AM. I went on a nice, short little run with my lovely friends Maahi and Arion. It was pleasantly warm outside with enough heat to start sweating uncontrollably.

We traversed back to the dorms to cool off before meeting everyone else before breakfast. Us tiny, young children still need to be walked to our meals. A WHOPPING 10 MINUTES AWAY! Truly, an intense workout too much for our undeveloped brains. 

As we walked over to the breakfast meetup, I was met with a choir of nerds serenading me with a beautiful chorus of “Happy Birthday”. I turned 17 years old that day! I became a dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17! (who doesn’t love an ABBA reference?)

We sweltered as we sauntered over to breakfast that day. After dining, we just went to the lab and started the arduous work of experimental planning. It was extremely confusing, but with the help of Dr. Messner and other students, it started making just a little bit

 Then, lunch. As I walked into the dining hall, I was greeted by a speaker blasting “Dancing Queen”, dancing TAs, and multiple phones recording me. Another birthday surprise!

And then, back to lectures. We learned about DNA sequencing – the entire time, my brain was breaking down. What was this … dideoxyribonucleaic acid? Who is Sanger? What are all these big words!! I always thought that those little machines in Jurassic World that did DNA sequencing were just made-up movie material, but suddenly they were real in the form of Nanopores!

Who woulda thunk it. My youthful brain simply could not handle it. The attentive student I am, I resisted sleep and powered through and actually managed to eke out some understanding.

We went back to the dining hall, yet again, for a tasty dinner of lasagna. Angelina, Arion and I had an insightful conversation with Dr. Messner about books, movies, consumerism, microtrends and fashion.

Caption: Arion, Angelina, Dr. Messner and I in a somewhat-candid shot. Dr. Messner was taking a picture of me taking a picture, in true Dr. Messner-fashion.

As dinner was coming to a close, Mr. Steinmen had a few words for us. As usual, he started with announcements about what to expect for the coming day – a brief growth curve lab and a Target/Walmart run.

Then, in a turn of surprise, Mr. Steinmen had me stand on a chair while the entire group sang “Happy Birthday” to me – the third time that day! After I dismounted that chair, it turned out that kind TAs had brought cake and cupcakes to celebrate. As the birthday girl, of course I had first dibs on the cake, a delicious Tres Leches.

Caption: Me and the delicious cake. It was from Albertsons. 10/10 recommend. Would eat again.

Caption: Me awkwardly standing on the chair. What do you even do with yourself while people sing to you? Clap along? Join the singing and have a little ego-boost moment?

Caption: After the cake, our lovely TA Miss Alexa took a .5 shot of us. The photographic quality is astounding.

But, as I sat down to dine on my sweet treat, an unsuspecting cake attack was inflicted upon me. A so-called “friend” had smooshed a cupcake into my face! If you want, you can watch that video here: https://youtu.be/R9ZCFNvgFjE

Then, after I cleaned my face off of frosting, we headed back to the lecture hall to work on our problem sets and parameter-building. My group finished pretty quickly and actually turned in our work early. Finally, we were ahead of the piles and piles of work.

Caption: Us after we finished our work. We were just vibing in the room and decided to take a picture. We love 0.5 shots around here! We were in the middle of our crossword and took a picture for the memories.

I attempted to fulfill my daily crossword addiction by starting on the NY Times crossword with Arion. I was feeling major withdrawl symptoms since usually I complete a crossword at breakfast each day, but I had failed to do so this past week due to the copious amounts of work to complete. 

We tried to fill in square after square, but unfortunately we were unable to finish it.

In all seriousness, my experience at SSP so far has been amazing. I’ve met some really cool people and learned so much in only 5 days. I’m excited to see what happens next and hope that our experiments go well!

Thanks for being here, dear reader.