Craziness

Hello for the third time!

This has been a crazy week. Being gone all weekend and having the first two midterms of my graduate school was not a good combination. I have so been looking forward to this weekend and I am thrilled that it is finally here!

Before I plunged into a week of seemingly endless genetics and pathology, I celebrated my birthday. I turned a whole year older on Sunday. I celebrated by going out to dinner with a friend and being sung to by my wonderful family! :-) I think I may bake celebratory cupcakes or something in the future...

Monday - Thursday were primarily a blur during which I spent every spare moment buried in a mountain of new information. My wonderful lab PI and post-doc gave me Wednesday and most of Thursday off for studying. I am very grateful to them for their understanding. I know other first students who weren't so lucky... My genetics exam was not too bad. It didn't turn out as well as i hoped, but I am glad it is done. The pathology test was actually fun - weird I know, but it was very well written so that you really had to know the information in order to answer the questions. It was fun to read through them and pick out all the little intricacies that could trip someone up who had a cursory understanding of the material. I say this without knowing how I did, so hopefully I didn't fall for too many tricks. I have discovered two things - 1: I really like histology type material - especially because the lecture prof was excellent. I think part of it is also because I am a visual person, so I can see what I am learning about. 2: I have discovered that I dislike the "complex" stats involved in genetics...I think I am more of a molecular geneticist.

Enough about tests, moving on to some other exciting tidbits from this week - actually all from today. Due to the trend of nice weather, I decided to test out my new bike (finally) and rode to campus. The ride is quite short, only about 15 minutes, however, I have discovered why they call this lovely town Chapel Hill. I live on a hill and campus is on a hill, unfortunately this is not the same hill. :-( The one downside to biking, it really is uphill both ways. haha! Aside from needing to get my handle bars tightened so they stop squeaking, the bike works quite well. I love the fact that it is so light. I even rode in the street and did not have any close encounters of the automobile kind - also reassuring.

The other semi-exciting tidbit from today is a new technique I did in lab, well it is actually a common technique, but it was new to me. I finally got to run a PCR reaction. For those of you who are not familiar with this, PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. Basicially it is a way to increase the concentration of a sample of DNA. A common use for it is in forensics. Say someone has a small amount of DNA from a crime scene, but they need a larger amount to actually run tests. They could use PCR to make the small sample larger. Some of you may be thinking, why is Sarah so excited about doing PCR, there is really nothing to it! True, it is pretty easy, but I had only learned about it in class up until this point and I have found that don't truly understand something until I actually do it, thus now I know.

One other fun event from this week was a Newman Center choir potluck that I went to on Monday. I got a chance to meet a few other graduate students and some community members, share a meal, and then sing afterwards. Oh, I have started playing guitar at Mass. It was such a joy when I did it two weeks ago for the first time in about a month. I really realized how much I missed it. I found a fellow choir member who lives about 5 minutes from apartment complex and literally drives right by on his way to Mass. This was exactly the scenario I was looking for. He and his family have been wonderful picking me up on their way by!

Tomorrow afternoon I am hoping to go to the UNC vs Virgina Tech football game. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I can get in...I hear it is pretty hard. Eileen, I will be thinking of you as I deck out in my Tarheel Blue! :-)

Well, that is all my news from Tarheel Country. Thank you so much for all the personal emails, I really enjoy reading them and hearing from you all; however, I realize my response time is much less than ideal. :-/ I also hope to get caught up on that this weekend...

I hope that you are each doing well!

Take care!

Sarah