April 2016 Review

Admittedly, almost nothing of note happened in my life in April. But here I am with a blog post anyway!

FRIENDS: I had fabulous sleepovers with Alice, Chloe and Ben (who are all stellar beans), and shoutout to Daniel for Skyping me in Irish the weekend before my oral.

LEAVING CERT: I had my French oral, which was grand although I stumbled a lot when she asked me why I think there are fewer women than men in science. Irish was also good, but the second question she asked me in the Comhrá was "Do you think they'll find a cure for Alzheimer's?" I managed to deal with it but holy shit. I got the easiest poem (Colscaradh) and supposedly the easiest sraith (Bua sa Chomórtas Raidió), but honestly I would have much preferred a harder sraith like Timpiste/Athrú Aeráide/Gearrchéim Eacnamaíochta because I'm better at those. Oh well!

SCIFEST: This was the focus of my month. I did a project for Scifest investigating features of bacteria that influence their susceptibility to inactivation to UVC light. One of the weeks, I spent 30 hours on top of school doing lab work for it ... It was intense. I am really proud of it though, it's a solid project. Big thanks to Dr. Bríd Quilty of DCU and others for helping me get the bacteria I needed for the project. I've learned a ton about aseptic technique and I've actually drastically improved my lab skills, which is cool. Scifest itself was in May so I'll talk about that in my next monthly review.

COMPETITION: Not much competition-related news this month. I found out that I'd won National Runner-up in my category for the Drugs.ie writing awards. That's the competition at which I won my iPad last year. I've been invited to an awards ceremony in the Department of Education for it on Wednesday 11th May but honestly I don't want to miss more Chemistry so I probably can't go.

POLITICS: I procrastinated way too much this month by reading political analysis of the US presidential primaries, especially on fivethirtyeight.com. It's fascinating, and the data. Love it.

So that's about it! Lots of hard work this month, definitely not enough studying and very little on the competition side of things.