Science and technology.
Virtual reality. Cryptology.
Manchego, birthdays, electrophysiology.
I’ve only spent a week here with the people in my program (MSRP Biology, and within that CBMM, of which Wellesley is one of their partner schools), but I cannot express how much I love it. There are those moments when you fall in with your people, you know? People who are diverse and welcoming and with the sunniest outlooks, who will fall into rapture over Manchego cheese and describe their electrophysiology experiments in the same mouthful. Who will stare you in the eye when you describe your research without a glaze of politeness or confusion. Who work hard during the day, play hard during the night, who go out to dinner, out to bars, celebrate birthdays with all forty of us trooping along. We had a communal brunch today, eating crepes, scones, paratha, blueberries, nutella, and Mexican flavoring. Almost everyone speaks another language. For a fourth of us English is a second language.
And when I’m tired from some of the easiest socializing I’ve ever experienced, I’ll go to my room and pull out my new tablet, reading “Cryptology” and “Ready Player One.” Moving from the table of happily chatting nerdy science geeks to reading about nerdy science geeks. If I mention this, I’m sure I will find many other fans. I will also find many who are not fans, who have different backgrounds, cultures, and interests. You know that Indian grocery market I visited last week? I went back with Deepshikha, who helped me pick what to buy. Candace is the expert on “ratchet” Youtube videos, and Chad explained to me what “ratchet” was. Yesterday, three separate people explained the public transportation systems of Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and New York respectively, with asides on the relative merits of the schools surrounding these systems. And don’t even get me started on how much talk there is about food: American food, Indian food, Puerto Rican food, Mexican food, good food, bad food, food.
We see each other at the gym, at the Pride parade, at Haymarket, the shopping stores, downstairs locked out of our rooms, at the dorm’s piano, on the bus, everywhere. There’s been more neurobiology in casual conversation than I’ve ever heard in my life. The second floor kitchen is our hub, and Facebook groups, GroupMe groups, cell phones, knocking on doors, and emails help bind us to it. It is so easy to love.
I’d sent out emails to some old high school professors last week, and several of them have replied. In response to one of my comments, Mr. Szporn wryly told me that “50% of life is content, and 50% is navigating the treacherous waters of interpersonal relations.” I relayed this to an old Robotics mentor, mentioning how wonderful it is to be with the CBMM program now. He laughed, but reminded me that there are many personalities out there. He said: “a little flexibility in how you deal with people can go a long way.” So true, and I am far better with some personalities than others, some groups more than others, some people more than others. But this group is not a struggle. It is a gift.
There’s a lot of the summer left to go, and I’ve got electrophysiology data to analyze, fMRI data to compile, and presentations to prepare for and give. There are books to be read while exercising, food to be made and exclaimed over, people to be listened to and laughed with.
Let this summer’s present be endless.
Lovely :).
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Last summer, I posted dimsum pictures almost every Saturday. I’m hoping to do this same this summer, though there are now so many opportunities to do new things that I might not continue the tradition every weekend! My camera does not have flash (though it is waterproof, shockproof, and can be dropped from 5 meters, almost all of which I have accidentally tested), so this picture is low-quality, but you can see Li, me, Rana, Alejandro, and Conan. When you are enrolled in a program where you can’t pronounce half of the last names, you know you’re in a good place :).
Watching the Boston Pride parade after dimsum! I love how normal it is to support the LGBTQ community nowadays. I feel like public sentiment changed so rapidly, even from when I was in middle school. This might be a function of location and age group, of course, but I love how it was not question of whether we would attend Pride, just a question of where it was :).
At Pride, heading down to Haymarket. Haymarket got kudos from all assembled :). Me, Conan, Rana, Alejandro, Li, Chad, Kristin, Ricardo.
Sunday dinner with a Wellesley friend at Harvard Square, Erin.
(and now for a nonexistent transition to a picture of my desk, from which I’m writing this post…) Look at the technology party happening right here, guys. (Plus, my camera.) And the best part is the tablet and my phone and my camera are all Android-ish, so that even though I don’t understand any of them I don’t understand them all equally! Plus I have like 4 chargers now. Make sure to pay attention to both those books on the left– Ready Player One on the tablet (and THAT was a bit of a trek. I now know how to buy Kindle books from Amazon and read them on an Android tablet though, which is fantastic) and Cryptomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I got to a page in “Ready Player One” where a list of authors appeared, including: Douglas Adams, Heinlein, Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, Gaiman, Stephenson, Kurt Vonnegut, and a few other names I hadn’t heard of, and I was like COPY THEM DOWN, MONICA, COPY THEM DOWN NOW. It’s not often I run into a list where I know three fourths of the authors already and I love the majority of them. I don’t mention it on the blog that often, but I love-love-love reading. I do at least six hours of fun reading a week, which really shouldn’t be possible during the school year, but I have tried stopping multiple times and it has never been successful. My English teacher gave me a list of classics to read over the summer, and I told her I’d try… but this is where the good stuff is, and none of them are on her list :).
But hey, I actually did some work this week too! Unfortunately, I was not able to start my research project, because the computer system was down, and anyway we were set on the week-long the project I am about to describe. Prof. Conway (he’s my P.I., i.e. principle investigator, i.e. research professor) has a friend at Harvard who is retiring from his lab to go back and do more wet-lab work. Prof. Dowling was kind enough to give us basically his entire lab, with its thousands of dollars worth of equipment… which the undergraduate students were in charge of cataloguing and relocating to Wellesley! There are four undergrads in the lab right now: me, Galen, Eileen, and Evelyn, shown here in Prof. Dowling’s lab at Harvard. We all get along with each other and the other members of the lab, which is wonderful :).
This is the optical bench, and Galen was pretty much single-handedly put in charge of both disassembling it at Harvard and reassembling it at Wellesley. Prof. Dowling studied the mechanisms of the retina (which is the layer of cells at the back of the eye that is responsible for animals being able to see) in zebra fish, which necessitated being able to shine different wavelengths of light on the eye with high precision. Galen’s the newest member of the lab, but she did such a thorough and impressive job with understanding how this equipment worked that I know she’ll be making impressive contributions in no time.
This was basically what I was in charge reassembling back at Wellesley (Josh and Mela were in charge of dissassembling it). There are two of these towers, and they’re basically metal frames with various forms of electrophysiology equipment screwed into them. The Dowling lab did electrophysiology with zebra fish, where electrophysiology involves placing a thin wire into cells and recording their action potentials (electric signals that neurons use to communicate with each other.) On the final day of the move-out from Harvard, the whole lab actually came out to help disassemble everything: Mela (our post-doc), Josh (our computer guy), Prof. Conway, Kaitlin (our lab manager), Galina (our old lab manager who is leaving for med school in July), us the undergraduates, and Jane in spirit (she actually stayed at HMS, but we got most of the lab at least). We definitely should have taken pictures: it was quite the lab outing :).
Take a look at this! I was super excited when I dug it out. Whenever one of us found a date for anything we found in Prof. Dowling’s lab, we took great pride in calling the number out… the average year tended to be 1989. I have no idea when this was made, but it looks like an ammeter, which measures current. Nowadays, we have these handheld things maybe 1/3 of this size that can measure current, resistance, voltage, and much more (I don’t know that much about voltmeters). This old ammeter obviously got carried around in its own box, and it was heavy. I couldn’t resist taking a picture.
Here’s Prof. Dawling himself (who was extremely sweet and helpful the entire time) showing us around the multi-million dollar facility holding all of Harvard’s zebra fish. So cool!
Guess who was successful in reassembling the two towers and the two optical hoods? That’s right, we were. Kaitlin and Galina walked in the room and I said: “Guess who’s amazing.” I don’t know if we’ll be doing experiments with zebra fish anytime soon, but we have a lot of the equipment hooked up, so we can be ready to go :).