Finals

Yesterday I took 3 final exams: Genetics, Human Physiology, and Analysis of Equilibrium Systems Lab Practical. Tomorrow morning I have the Analysis written final. The genetics test was really really hard. I studied human physiology by far the most out of all my classes, but I studied genetics a fair amount. This section was just so confusing. It was all regulation of genes. I kept getting eukaryotic and prokaryotic mixed up and transcription and translation mixed up. I'm just glad it's over. Luckily I did well enough on my first 3 sectional exams that I had some wiggle room on the final. My physiology exam went great! My professor is so amazing, she already graded them and put them in the biology office for us to pick up. Not only that, but she wrote our final grade in the class on the test as well. So I know that I got a 91% on the final, and an 87.5% in the class: a B+! I am very happy with that. The lab practical also went surprisingly well. I was so nervous for it. We were told that it would be similar to one of the labs we did during the quarter, but instead of being given pages and pages of instructions, we had to figure out how to do it on our own. That is very scary for someone like me who looooves to ask questions and needs to know every detail before I do anything. We were allowed to use our lab notebooks (with whatever we chose to write in them throughout the quarter) which turned out to be a big help. After a few mistakes in the beginning (and my buret breaking and spilling 0.1M NaOH everywhere) I finally got the hang of it and I think I turned in a very good report. I heard horror stories from people who took the practical earlier in the week, so I think mine went relatively well.

Today I got to sleep in. Daniel had to go to school for his tuba lesson, so I had to wait for him to come home around 11 before I could go to work. Technically, I could have gone to work before his lesson, but I would rather have an excuse to sleep in :-) And they don't care at all if I'm a few hours late. Today turned out to be a fantastic day at work. Judy, a post-doc whom I have been working with a lot in the lab, introduced me to my very own project! In the summer, a bunch of students will be starting in the lab and the more experienced ones are given their own project. Since I'm already working there, they are giving me a head start on mine. This is just one idea, and I can decide if it's really what I want to do or not. So far, it sounds sort of interesting. Judy sat down and explained all this stuff to me that was a little beyond my comprehension even with 3 years of college level science. But I feel like I learned a lot and I at least have a basic idea of what the project would entail. It has to do with the immune system in different strains of mice. In research labs, they use specific strains of mice to do testing on. A strain is sort of like a family: they all have the same or similar DNA. Labs all over the world buy their mice from breeding laboratories, so there are major strains that are found in many laboratories. At National Jewish, we do work with A/J, 129, C57, BALBc, etc. A scientist can do the same exact experiment on different strains of mice and each strain will have completely different results. Obviously, this is not good. It's hard to tell which results are valid and relevant to humans when every strain of mouse gives different results. So, her idea is for me to better quantify the differences. She is doing a project in which she is exposing cells from different strains to ozone. Ozone can really hurt your lungs if you breathe it in. She noticed that different strains of mice have different quantities of immune cells. Some of them had very high numbers of specific T-cells, while other strains had very low numbers. So the goal is for me to look at 5 specific strains and use flow cytometry to quantify how many of different kinds of cells they have. Judy said that hopefully at the end, I will have a PUBLISHED paper with MY NAME on it!! Like a real journal article! That will be incredible for my resume. My article would help scientists decide which strain of mouse to use for their own research. It doesn't sound like the most fascinating topic, but what's important is that it is definitely an attainable goal for me. So the first step is to get animal certification so I can breed, feed, sacrifice, and harvest my own mice. I also need to do research to make sure there isn't already a published article on the exact same topic I hope to do. And I need to look up what papers have been published that are similar to this. She already gave me about 50 pages of journal articles to read. And she gave me my own research notebook (to take notes while I do research) and my own lab notebook (to take notes while I conduct experiments). It's all SO EXCITING!

In the meantime, I need to finish up finals. I haven't studied hardly at all for my test tomorrow. I feel like I know a lot of the topics. The example problems he does in class are so easy. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well on my last exam, but I did really well on the first exam. So we'll see how it goes. I think I studied so hard for physiology that I'm just all final-ed out. Hopefully that doesn't come back to bite me.