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There are fourteen days left until I fly back to California for a much-needed break from this whole MIT madness. In these fourteen days I have:
- One three-page paper, 1.5 spacing, written in Chinese about the change in China’s societal structure as reflected by clothing of different eras
- One ten-minute Chinese presentation on the same topic
- One take-home Chinese exam, in which I have to translate the phrase “cultivation and molding of humanistic spirit, and the harmony of traditional and modern cultures” into Chinese. I don’t even know what that means in English Please don’t tell me what it means (that’s cheating :P), but feel free to laugh at it.
- One 7.10 pset, which should not have existed (as per the syllabus).
- One 7.23 final.
- Two piano recitals, during which I will be performing two different Bach concertos. I love Bach. He is my 17th century lover. (Sorry, Bobby. You didn’t exist bach then. HAHA FUNNY TYPO. I will leave it as is.)
- One ATS Xifan Sunday
- One TKD banquet, during which all the freshmen and/or new team members will present a skit roasting the seniors and instructors. I helped write it. It includes song and dance. It will be epic.
- One TKD cup party. (Did I mention that we won the league cup? No? WE WON THE CUP! IT IS, ACTUALLY, A VERY LARGE CUP. OF THE DRINK-OUT-OF VARIETY, NOT THE PROTECT-YOUR-GROIN VARIETY. I had to explain this to someone Michelle two days ago. Made for an interesting conversation.)
So basically, Chinese owns my soul, Bach owns my heart, and ATS+TKD nourish my (empty, empty) body.
Also, I’ve been eating yogurt + a crushed Nature Valley granola bar anda Sabra pretzel chips + hummus cup for lunch every other day for the past week or so. It is delicious and nutritious and I don’t think I will ever get sick of it. Until I’m back home in California eating my mommy’s delicious cooking and wondering why the hell I ever put those things in my mouth.
Also also, I’m not sure why I only blog on Tuesdays.
For the past week or so, I’ve been sick, sick, sick-nasty sick. Fever, sore throat, runny nose, nausea, exhaustion, etc…I had them all covered. I do hope it goes away by this weekend, because I don’t particularly fancy sparring or trying to cheer people on at TKD collegiate nationals in my current state.
I woke up from a nap today to find an email in my inbox from my 7.10 professor saying that he missed me in lecture and asking if everything was okay. In a class of maybe forty or so students, he knew my name AND my face AND that I wasn’t in class. Granted, I had him for a class last semester, but isn’t he the most awesome professor ever? Besides caring about his students, he’s also incredibly energetic about everything he teaches, be it protein filtration or deriving Le Chatalier’s principles. My favorite professor at MIT, f’sho. Little ones, take note: take as many classes with Professor Yaffe as possible!
And now, to bed. Go immune system, go!
This semester, one of the course 7 electives I’m taking is Immunology. Now, you’d think immunology is a super awesome subject, right? I mean, the immune system is fascinating–it’s constantly evolving and adapting and it goes through so many levels to keep your body safe from intruders.
Not so with the current 7.23 professor! She’s an older woman with the most soporific voice in the entire world. Try as I might, I can never bully my consciousness into staying alert for the entire two hours and always end up either falling asleep or fooling around on my laptop. Hopefully, the other two professors who teach this class will be better lecturers, but from what I’ve heard from past students, I shouldn’t keep my hopes up too much.
But check out this picture from the second lecture (click on it for a larger image). The yellow blobs are macrophages, and they look so happy! This picture has thus far been the highlight the class.
I haven’t blogged much recently ’cause school started and the usual early-semester flurry sucked up my life. I’m only taking 3.5 classes this semester, but with a 12-credit UROP, chamber music, Emerson, ITASA, ATS, and TKD, my schedule is pretty packed. I hope to get my life back on track soon, because I’ve been ridiculously disorganized and scatterbrained these past few weeks. My grasp on my sanity has been tenuous, but hopefully things will settle down in the next few days.
I meant to post this on Valentine’s Day, but I hope you guys don’t mind it being late. Here’s a big <3 to all my friends and family who have been with me through thick and thin, whether it’s for the past 21 years or for the past 21 days. I love you all. :)
(Also: thermo sucks.)
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.
I’ve been studying really hard for finals all week, trying to cram a semester’s worth of 9.01 and a month’s worth of 7.06 into my head. 7.20 would wait until Wednesday afternoon, after the other two. Last night, I was down in Dining reviewing some Neuroscience with Angela. When it hit 1:30, I decided to call it a night. After all, I had a 7.06 final at 9am, and after that a whole ‘nother three hours before the 9.01 final.
As I walked up the three flights of stairs to my room, a funny feeling came over me. Nerves, anxiety…too much CRH released by my hypothalamus into my anterior pituitary, in turn secreting ACTH to tell my adrenal cortex to dump a whole crapton of cortisol into my bloodstream. I packed my backpack and prepared to go to sleep, but I thought I’d check the location of my morning final one more time, just to make sure 7.06 WAS in duPont at 9am on Wednesday, December 17th.
Oho. It wasn’t. It was on in duPont at 9am on Thursday, December 18th. Now this may sound pretty awesome, ’cause I’d get an extra few hours of sleep, plus a couple more hours to study, but in 7.06’s place was the 7.20 final at in duPont at 9am on Wednesday, December 17th. A 7.20 final that I was convinced was on Thursday.
There are no words for the panic that flooded my body (actually, there are: my sympathetic nervous system ramped itself up and constricted my blood vessels and increased my heart rate to 5 million bpm and…!@%(*&@#&^#@$^!!!!!). I’d spent the entire week studying for the wrong final!
I ended up studying 7.20 until 6, napping for two-and-a-half hours, then waking up at 8:30 to brush my teeth and bike frantically to duPont, arriving at exactly 8:57am.
In retrospect, that was the most productive four hours of studying I’ve ever done in my life. And I think (hope, pray) I did relatively well on the exam. Not that I would ever want to do that again, but I’m just saying. Now I’m feeling pretty chill about tomorrow’s exam because I…you know…ALREADY STUDIED FOR IT. Agh. I just took a burning hot shower and started packing my suitcase for home. I’ll probably study some more in a bit.
But first, a nap.
Oh, digressionary tidbit. I was walking out (early!) of the 9.01 final when I received a text from my sister, copied here verbatim:
HAHAHA Theres thirty people on my flight. I might even get my own row. There is a brown doggie too.
I’m not sure if I resent her more for the fact that she’s already on her way home, that she gets her own row on the plane, or that there’s a brown doggie on the plane. I think the doggie.
It is also cold as all hell outside. With snow (sorta) and ice (mostly). Brr.
I am a big ball of energy. I’m so excited about everything right now. If I weren’t morally opposed to exclamation mark abuse, everything I type would end with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. For now, I’ll settle for bouncing up and down, flapping my arms when I talk.
How am I excited? Let me count the ways.
1. Friends coming back to Boston. (!!!!!!!)
2. TKD tournament on Saturday.
3. Absurdly cute ATS kids. And fondue with them. Like…next to them. Not dipping them.
4. Bringing ITASA East Coast Conference to MIT.
5. Seeing doggies running around. There’s this one golden retriever puppy I see every day on my way to class. She’s such a sweetheart, and her owner adores her.
Admittedly, I’m still sleep-deprived and in a desperate battle against the cold infecting half the pistol team, but I feel like I could do anything in the world. Except schoolwork. I’m entirely too excited to do schoolwork.
Unexciting: Someone is eating something incredibly meaty next to me, and the smell is revolting.
Also: I have yet to write a blog post (probably since…oh…early 2007) that has been over 200 words long. What can I say? I’m spastic. :)
Well then.
I’m not studying. My friends have convinced me to watch the new episode of House instead. I will blog during commercial breaks. :D
I just started watching House this season just because it’s constantly on in the lounge. I’m taking 7.20 (Human Physiology) right now, and it is so cool to actually know what the medical terms the doctors in the show throw around mean. When there are commercials for athersclerosis (which I will never be able to pronounce) medication, I feel so powerful because I know how it works. Woo, MIT education.
I live on a rather interesting wing. Next House 3W is an amalgamation of gamer dorks, plain ol’ dorks, semi-normal girls, and some fairly quiet freshmen. Around me as I type, four are doing homework, two are writing scripts to hack the Victoria Secret’s Collegiate Collection website and autovote for MIT, and one is reading The Tech (school newspaper). We just spent ten minutes discussing whether the patient in this episode could’ve possibly missed the fact that she can’t produce tears or saliva.
Aaand the episode is over. I hope I don’t fail this test tomorrow.
