I don’t have any grand international adventures for you this week. Well into the semester, everything feels familiar, like it couldn’t be any other way. I figured I would just describe a typical week in the life of a Wellesley student for you, but then I realized that my “typical” week actually involved synthesizing my own nylon, watching a silent film accompanied by live singers, running a PCR on Galapagos weevil DNA by myself, passionately debating which countries should pay for climate change mitigation, and writing a paper about whether or not it’s morally wrong to throw a dead possum for fun. So there’s that.
Standout moments in a (not-so) typical week.
- Making my own nylon. Yeah, there’s something crazy about being able to create your own nylon 6.6 polymer, look at it, and be like a hundred years ago, nobody knew about the reaction I just did. And now, that product right in front of me is in my clothes right now. (Only I was wearing cotton and polyester, but that’s beyond the point).
Fume hoods are not conducive to great photography, but this is the what nylon making looks like in action.
- Joan of Arc and the Orlando Consort. I work as an usher for the Wellesley College Concert series, meaning I get paid to (among other things) watch and listen to beautiful musical performances. Last Saturday, we hosted the British vocal group the Orlando Consort, who basically created an accompanying score of various medieval songs to accompany the silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Never one to watch silent films before, and only passingly familiar with the story of Joan of Arc, it was one of those profound performances that leaves you disturbed and shell-shocked, but also with more understanding and sympathy than you came in with.
An still image from the film La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (also the the Wellesley College daily shot)
- Running a PCR on Galapagos weevil DNA by myself. The best way to describe this is that it’s like the intern finally learning how to work the photocopier…of science! PCR’s make lots of copies of specific DNA sequences so that we can analyze them. Just getting to the point where I know what I’m doing in the lab enough to run a PCR independently is a pretty big milestone for me, considering that last year, I didn’t even know that a PCR, well, existed.
Oooh, that is one fine PCR right there. I wonder who prepared those well-labeled samples?
- The high-tension debate over who should pay for climate change mitigation. I’ve never really considered debating to be my thing; I much prefer to slowly work out my arguments on paper. But watching my Environmental Ethics class in action gives me the good academic kind of discomfort. Yes, the tension is high, but only because people are so passionate about what they’re arguing about and so capable of defending opinions they don’t even personally hold.
You only get to see the “pro-industrialized countries paying the bulk of climate change mitigation” arguments, because that’s the side I got to argue for 😉
- Finally turning in the possum paper. For my first philosophy paper ever, I thought a lot about dead possums. Apparently, New Zealand grammar school students held a fundraiser in which they shot possums and had a possum throwing contest with the carcasses before selling the pelts. It seems like an utterly ridiculous prompt for an 8 page paper, until you start to think of the bigger, more interesting questions involved, like do we have a moral obligation to the dead? I ended up using virtue ethics to argue that possum throwing encourages vices in the next generation of moral agents. Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d say: it was actually enjoyable, writing about dead possums.
It was so nice getting to see so many of you on campus at Discover Wellesley Weekend, and I hope you too are able to find some novelty even in the most ordinary of weeks.
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor