Winter 2024

After an amazing trip to India to see family and recharge, I was thrown back into the fire of school. I landed in Seattle on the 8th and was immediately hit with a slew of iGEM interviews, preparing study plans, and attending classes while being totally jetlagged. It was brutal and by the next week I was already drowning and burnt-out. This schedule doesn't even include the time I went into the lab for research, so rest assured I was absolutely exhausted. I think this kind of set the tone for this quarter as I was often tired and frustrated that I wasn't able to accomplish even basic tasks that I wanted to. 

One skill I was really proud of developing over this quarter was reading biology papers. I had started learning the BQMOC method in Biol 355 in the spring of my sophomore year, but I still felt like I needed the professors and TAs to break down papers and figures for me. But in Ecology and Advanced Cell Biology, my two biology classes this quarter, I feel I took real strides in this regard. These two classes are basically on opposite scales when it comes to biology, but the skills were definitely applicable in both. I found myself interested in the topics and being able to understand the methods helped me understand the figures much better. By the end of the quarter, I felt like a completely different scientist. The artifact is my (imperfect) version of a figure covering basically everything we learned in the Cell Biology class -- we focused on the insulin pathway in cells!