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My cute doggie, to be exact. This is Jakie. He’s a ten-years-and-eight-months-old golden retriever who thinks he’s still a puppy. Despite the fact that his hips have gradually succumbed to arthritis, he loves hiking, swimming, and begging for bread. He’s very good at begging for bread because he knows who exactly in our family can’t resist him.
Jakie is exceptionally tolerant of my sister and me putting random junk on him. Like the blanket she made him for Christmas or my mom’s hat and sunglasses.
He also does the sad puppy face incredibly well. I know. I only learn from the best.
Regularly scheduled posting will resume…later.
I’ve always wanted to be a veterinarian. I’ve always wanted to help animals. People. Things. When someone with an armful of groceries drops their car keys on the ground, I pick them up. When a stray cat is wandering around in the rain, I feed her and plug in a heater for her in my garage. When my stuffed animal falls off my bed, I put it back up because, really, they have feelings too.
It seems natural, then, that I would go into a profession in the healthcare field. To put it simply, all living things are happiest when they’re healthy. I’d like to keep them healthy. And I love animals (probably the most over-used three words in veterinary school application history, but that doesn’t make it any less true). I want to be a Veterinarian Without Borders and go to third-world countries and provide free medical care for otherwise neglected animals.
But I’ve been cooking and baking a lot recently and I’ve come to realize that I love food, too. Reading food blogs and watching Ace of Cakes has lit a little flame inside me saying HAY, MAYBE YOU WANT TO BE A PASTRY CHEF WHEN YOU GROWS UP. I’m a third-year biology student at MIT following the dream she’s had since she was a kid. What the hell am I doing having dreams of cookies and bread and three-tiered wedding cakes? Delusions of grandeur, for sure.
And yet.
My internship this summer at the NEA is only three days a week. For the other four days, I was originally planning on volunteering at the MSPCA and continuing my UROP in the Ploegh Lab. Maybe…maybe I’ll try to get a part-time cashier job at Flour Bakery or something for two of those days. After all, there will still be a need for pastries when I retire.
(By the way, check out Flour’s head chef’s bio on the website.)
Yaay! The New England Aquarium in Boston accepted me as a summer intern in their Animal Medical Center! Validation! I am not useless! Exclamation mark!
In all seriousness, I’m really excited to be spending summer at the NEA. The stuff they do is really interesting, and the aquarium itself is pretty cool. It’s tiny compared to the Monteray Bay Aquarium back home, but they have pengiuns, jellies, sea turtles, and tons of fish (obviously). Plus, I really wanted to spend one undergrad summer in Boston, and this is my last one (omg).
On a related note, I’m interviewing to be a summer RA for Next House tomorrow. MIT has an RAA (resident associate advisor) program during the school year which pairs an undergrad with a professor to advise a group of freshmen for their first semester. I’ve always wanted to be an RAA, but have never been able to make the time commitment. Summer RAs are slightly different because there’s no academic aspect, but it’s still an awesome opportunity.
Random: I love falafel. So. Much.
In order to procrastinate studying for my two upcoming exams, I was re-reading some of my old Livejournal entries (holy crap…). Aside from being horrified at my emo and whiny nature, I found this gem. It’s my favorite lolcat picture ever, and it actually inspires me to work hard and become a good veterinarian. ‘Cause there are still lots of kitties to be saved all around the world, and I want to be their hero.
Today’s the last full-time day at my UROP for awhile, ’cause semester starts next week. Regardless of how many times you’ve heard me gripe about how boring or tedious lab is, it’s taught me a whole crapton. For example, I’m now so pro at loading gels, and I can run a Western like a postdoc. Transfecting cells? No problem. Pouring gels? I might give you a dirty look, but it’ll get done. Thank god my supervisor, Robert, is the nicest most patient person ever. Even if he has a deadline for a paper, he doesn’t mind taking time to help me develop a film or teach me how to make a certain buffer for the third time. If I were my own supervisor, I’d probably have fired me already. ^^;;
After a month at the Ploegh Lab, I’ve also learned that I definitely do not want to go into academia in any sense. Perhaps it’s the subject matter, but I just can’t imagine myself getting as excited as my postdoc about whether two proteins involved in proper protein folding interact or not. And hours upon hours at a lab bench pipetting microliters of solutions from one test tube to another? No, thank you.
In my UROP, I’ve also been exposed to a lot of animal testing, something I’m not entirely comfortable with. I understand that it’s for the sake of science and the “common good”, but there’s something disquieting about hearing someone say “This experiment would work much better with dog pancreas…Harvard should have a lot because they regularly slaughter beagles for their hearts at the medical school.” I suppose it’s something I’ll have to get used to because I’m going into a biological field, but I don’t know if I can justify it to myself yet. For now, I don’t have to deal with directly, but I’m not sure what I’d do if my supervisor told me to inject toxins into mice to see what effect it has on protein folding.
