7/11 Day But No Slurpees
(I would like to preface this blog post by saying that the TAs neglected to inform me that today was my turn to write the blog until halfway through the day.)
Otherwise, my day started when I woke up at around 7:45 after ignoring my three earlier alarms. Today we had absolutely no lab work, so I finally got to wear my new shorts (I would later regret this decision because I got really cold during the guest lecture 😭). I was supposed to get breakfast at 8 with Cailyn and Sophia, but we took too long to get ready (or woke up late, in Sophia’s case), so we just went straight to Lindley for our lectures.
We spent the first three hours working on two class activities: one for comparing specificity constants that we obtained from our last lab, and one for docking a ligand into our homology model. My group went through both activities pretty smoothly, although Emanuel was very mean to me because he said his ligand docking model was better than mine 😒 (it was). After getting our model confirmed by the TAs, we went to lunch at the IMU.
(Me with my research group) (Sophia with her dinosaur that she drew!)
My group was already late because we were waiting in line to have our ligand docking checked by the TAs, but I ended up only having five minutes to eat. I ordered a bowl of ramen, and ten minutes later I found out that they completely forgot to make my order, and even blamed me for not asking earlier about my food 🙄. It’s okay, though – I just brought the rest back to Lindley and finished it before the lecture began.
After a lecture on high-throughput screening by our fearless leader, Dr. H, we started working on writing up a lab procedure for tomorrow’s lab (which will apparently take the whole day 🥲). My group finished pretty quickly, so we sat around for a while until the guest speaker arrived. We actually hadn’t received any other information about today’s speaker besides his name, so I was pretty curious as to what he was going to talk about.
(Bissan introducing our guest speaker, Dr. Kunzman)
Dr. Kunzman gave a really interesting talk on failure and how we should change our mindset to recover from it. Everyone else was pretty interested too – I think we asked questions for like 45 minutes straight. Then we transitioned to the guest speaker reception (shoutout to group 8 for planning such a great platter!), and some people kept asking other questions. On the other hand, a couple of us got into a really heated debate over a question from the lecture: would you rather have $150,000 right now or have an 80% chance to get $1 million? Personally, I (and many others) would gamble for the $1 million, but Matthew was very insistent about just taking the $150,000.
(Cailyn side-eying Matthew for choosing $150,000) (Me with Sophia and Cailyn in the dorms!)
Once the guest speaker reception was over, we went back to the dorms to get changed and go to dinner at Forest. Mr. L was out with Talija to get her a new phone so we didn’t have formal dinner setup, but we still had to sit with our table groups. This week, I’m sitting with Nick and several other girls. I didn’t have to do my chore of dinner breakdown since there was no setup to begin with (thanks Talija ☺️), so I went right back to the dorms.
At around 8PM, we headed to the Biology Commons to work on our assignments. My group just worked on our presentation for next week, but I think some other groups worked on analyzing data or something. A little over halfway through, I decided to start interviewing some people for fun! (Sorry if I didn’t get to you 😢 I ran out of time and my mics ran out of battery.) Around 9:50PM, we headed back to the dorms for laptop turn-in and started getting ready for bed. That’s about it!
Video:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cJ05YwZjSa3jXYJIOs2Pu3aDSMSxJXut/view?usp=drivesdk