I’ve reached the point in the semester now where I’m in the homestretch. Technically, I have only two more weeks of classes as of this very moment, and I could not be more relieved. You reach a point late in the semester where every project and prelim seems to collapse into the same two weeks (and since you’ve been studying so hard for last night’s pchem exam, when you write the word “collapse” all you can think is “collapse of the wavepacket”.) I am right in the middle of those two weeks, but somehow having pchem out of the way makes me feel much further than halfway. Hence, it has been nearly a month, and I have a breather right now, so I am writing.
Also, I realized when I got multiple “I miss you” texts from home on the same day that I have, from the perspective of the west coast, dropped off the face of the Earth. So what has been going on? Oh, so much.
A communal kitchen is kind of like a breeding ground of passive aggressive behavior. Due to my unfortunately keen hearing, I heard a girl bawling her eyes out a couple of weeks ago. I assumed it was a boy issue or something to that effect. However, when I went into the kitchen later I saw a new message on the whiteboard: “To whoever ate my pizza: you are so MEAN. I come home after a really long day and all I wanted to do was enjoy my leftovers. You literally made me cry. PS: who steals someone else’s leftovers?” Here are a few other (admittedly somewhat paraphrased) examples:
-To whoever stole my glass mugs: could you put them back? I’m thirsty L Thanks! –Andrew
-To whoever stole my Chinese food: I hope you DIE from eating all that MSG. (Complete with drawings of flames.)
-WHOEVER’S DISHES THESE ARE PLEASE PUT THEM AWAY. I AM TIRED OF RECLEANING THEM AND YOU ARE MAKING THIS KITCHEN UNUSABLE. PS: FRUIT FLIES ARE GROSS.
Another joy of communal living is the communal bathroom. As a girl, I have had no problems with this (except for the broken toilet seat... but it was crack when we got here and was replaced within an appropriate amount of time), but apparently for the boys it is a different study. Currently Schuyler (my building) is having a design-the-Schuyler-T-shirt challenge. [Last year’s winner was to take the popular “Ithaca is Gorges” and adapt it to “Schuyler is Where?” It was quite successful.] Accordingly there are posters around with pictures of people wearing T-shirts that say YOUR DESIGN HERE. Fed up with his bathroom problems, someone graffiti-ed the poster in the elevator: “Schuyler: We can’t aim our #1s OR #2s”, which promptly received a “got my vote!”, a “mine too!” and a “mine three.”
My most recently completed group project was to model the breakdown of ethanol in a simplified version of the human body. While the model’s iterations are somewhat unrealistic (reaching a steady-state BAC takes over 100 iterations on a one drink per hour basis, and the steady-state assumption can only be made due to constant urination) I have a way of estimating a person’s BAC. A now appropriate conversation would be: “Are you sure you can drive?” “Have Gina run it through the spreadsheet.”
An interesting thing about group projects is how someone almost always ends up the leader, and how that someone almost always ends up being me. I volunteered to make the spreadsheet for this project because I was slow at making spreadsheets and wanted to improve, and suddenly they were calling me “our great leader” [Yeah, like what the North Koreans call Kim Jong Il.] I suppose I don’t mind being the leader, but it’s weird how it always happens that way.
My other group project is to design a new treatment for small-cell lung cancer, which is kind of a crazy thing to ask of people who have never taken above high-school biology. I think our group has come up with a pretty interesting idea, though. Small cell lung cancer cells have an opiate binding site that is not present on normal lung cells. After a 24 hour exposure, methadone will bind to these binding sites irreversibly, and stop tumor growth. Our idea, then, is to take a less addictive isomer of methadone (methadone is the drug they use to wean people off of heroine…), and attach it to an antibody. The methadone will bind to the cancer cells and stop them from growing. Then the antibody will trigger an immune response so that the body will attack the cancer cells. A big potential problem with this is its effects in immuno-compromised patients. Obviously, we won’t actually be making the drug, but it has been really cool researching it and talking to my professor.
The prospect of making treatments for cancer was kind of the reason that I got into engineering and chemical engineering in the first place. About a week into this project, I wasn’t really as interested in it as I thought I would be and was considering shifting my focus to consumer products or something. (I went to an information session for Procter and Gamble, where I learned that deodorant is surprisingly complex chemically, and has a much wider customer base than cancer medications. It’s also less depressing.) Now, though, I feel like my interest in cancer meds is rejuvenated. Having the professor I have, who’s research specialty is cancer and who was willing to talk to my group about this project for a full hour, has allowed me to learn a lot about cancer and how new treatments work that I would never have learned any other way, and I am extremely grateful. I’m going to see about working in his lab next summer.
Speaking of next summer… I just realized that I may not have mentioned here previously my plans for Co-op (and inadvertently the rest of college [a Co-op is like a long internship, lasting a semester and a summer]) and I should probably do that so you don’t get mad at me for never coming home again… So here is what my life looks like for the next… while.
Thanksgiving: visit Joe in NYC
December 14th: fly home for Christmas, hanging out, learning Java, and applying for Co-ops
January 7th: fly back to NYC
January 10th-18th: Go to Dublin(!) with Orchestra
Spring: Semester in Ithaca
(no idea what’s happening for Spring break)
Summer: Do research and take fall semester classes (most likely not coming home in between… Don’t hate me Riley!)
Fall: Co-op somewhere
Spring: Semester in Ithaca
Summer: Back at Co-op Company
Senior Year in Ithaca
…and then I’m done with college.
So that’s my life in a nutshell… I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving (and birthday. Just ordered your gift!) and that life as a TA continues to be fabulously hectic.
See you in less than a month!