My blogging day actually started at 12 am, where I finished up a portion of the lab notebook, primary literature search, and watched some lectures, which took me to 3 am. I was accompanied with a bunch of caffeine however in all sorts of shapes and sizes, including a mug of lavender black tea, some leftover Starbucks Nitro Cold Brew, and three cans of caffeinated sparkling water (in an awful flavor I might add). The minute I hit my bed, I could not wait to go and sleep for 7-8 hours and wake up just before the class activity.
Sadly, that did not happen, as I happen to have an almost 8-year-old sister. I did claim fatigue though, just so I could stay in bed for a little longer before getting ready, which once again included another mug of very strong tea. In our class activity block, we broke up into groups called “lunch tables”, in order to play some group-bonding games. After some clever responses to a Quiplash game, we switched to a topic about food (the name of “lunch tables” inspired us). All I can say is that there are some pretty bad opinions about food in the group, including that sweet potato fries were better than normal fries, that ketchup didn’t taste good, and that bell peppers were an exotic food.
Quiplash screenshot!!
Afterwards, we broke up into random groups in the class activity block and worked on using software to analyze images of SDS-PAGE gels (which are used to see what proteins are in a liquid and their molecular weight). When we ran electrophoresis gels back in biology, we did not have access to any of the fancy tools here and had to guess with our eyes like Neanderthals.
Our very pretty standard curve, I love it <3
In the late TA block (the rest of the afternoon was taken up by a well-deserved nap, family dinner, and my daily hour of self-deprecating), we had a fascinating conversation about how many kindergarteners and 3rd graders people could fight off. As the resident expert on this (because of my sister), I had a guess of about 5, while others were way too overenthusiastic and had projections of up to 40 small children. The rest of the block was taken up in a frantic haze to finish all of the work (including revising our hypothesis and literature survey), which of course spilled over into the next morning as well.
Background of our team member Alex, whose Zoom Audio wasn’t working
Some fun stats from the day:
- Amount of caffeine consumed in the early morning of 6/29: ~425 mg
- Amount of people in my “lunch table” who liked sweet potato fries over normal fries: 3
- Amount of caffeine consumed in total: ~550 mg
- Amount of times Dr. Hall and Kyle the TA had to come to our group to fix Image Lab: 3
