Today marks day 19 of our SSP adventure; we’re a little over halfway through the program. Over the last three weeks, I’ve become close friends with many participants (both in Biochem and Genomics), and I am excited to see where our friendships go in the latter part of the program.
While this week has been the most intense in terms of workload, we’ve also had many bonding activities, including our trip to Turkey Run State Park. Besides the awesome hiking at the park, I really enjoyed participating in the Purdue vs IU Biochem Basketball game. To our surprise, IU had some ballers and ended up beating us 15-8, but what was most exciting was getting to witness Dr. Hall play. IU couldn’t keep Dr. Hall out of the paint, and he ended up grabbing almost all of our rebounds. I’m convinced we would have had a good chance of winning if not for his ankle injury that kept him out of the latter part of the game.
After coming back from Turkey Run, we’ve been pretty busy the last few days. We spent a long time in the lab yesterday running trials for our specificity assay, working right up until (and into!) dinnertime. After dinner, we returned to the lab to make sure that our assay had worked and were pleased to find that our absorbance results matched closely to what we expected for each substrate. Today, we finished analyzing our results and began working on our introductions, which are due on Monday.
All in all, SSP has been really fun so far, and I’ve enjoyed the program more and more every week. Alternating between learning a lot and playing cards, ping pong, basketball, and volleyball is the perfect way to spend my summer.
Hello! My name is Cam, and I’m from Spartanburg, South Carolina. I like to run and have been waking up early to go on morning runs. I also like to watch tennis and have been enjoying watching Wimbledon throughout SSP!
