Today ended our second week here at Brown. It was also Erin's birthday, and I'm glad she had a lot of fun.
In class-related news, we performed more experiments today. We finished off our extraction of chromosomal DNA today. We were able to put our DNA onto slides, which we will use to put together our set of 23 chromosomes. Everything is done by the eye, so there is a lot of room to make mistakes. Speaking of mistakes, I made a lot this week. My lab results were not picture-perfect, and I was disappointed with myself. When I finished the written assignments for the week, I felt very guilty. I am definitely motivated to complete the third week better than the first two.
Also in class, we had our second quiz. The quiz was much harder than the first, mostly because the material was no longer review. I was angry at myself for not knowing more of the answers. On the bright side, the class has become more relaxed, and our T.A. Itsuka played music during the lab, which was refreshing. Ms. Hall, the professor, realized that she was putting too heavy of a load on us. We packed 2 labs into 3 hours, working on both at the same time. I didn't mind much, but I'm happy she loosened her packed schedule for us.
We saw Ms. Larson today, we ordered food from Soban, a new Korean restaurant. We ate leisurely outside of the Science Library and caught up. We are all excited to spend tomorrow night watching the water fire show.
Tomorrow, I'm going on the trip to Newport and am excited to explore Rhode Island more. It's nice to have a three-day weekend to relax (and study, of course!).
Frank,
ReplyDeleteDon’t take this the wrong way but because of the nature of your course the description of the labwork can be—how to put it politely—not exactly exciting. It’s important and we want to read about it but you have to admit that reading about putting DNA on slides isn’t very sexy.
Now the blogs for the next three days should be a different story. With all of the exciting things you’ll be doing and seeing, the blogs should be very interesting to read—especially if they’re filled with pretty pictures (hint, hint).
Keep up the good work, Frank. Try not to beat yourself up too much for the mistakes in the lab—that’s actually how you learn more than had you gotten it right the first time. Then again, it’s kind of nice to get it right, isn’t it?
It's so nice to see students motivated to do better on their classwork -- That's inspiration to me, Frank! I'll try my best when I'm out there too!
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