This post is pretty thrown together because god I have so much to do for college jesus and I just want to have a record of what was up in my life each month. [misc religious terms]
Inktober
I did Inktober for the first time in October. The idea is to draw a different ink drawing every day following the prompts in order to develop good drawing habits. I totally ignored the 'ink' requirement and sometimes ignored the prompts, but I did draw every single day so that's cool. I'm writing a post specifically about Inktober at the moment so you can see the drawings.
Yesterday, instead of doing the day's #inktober2018 prompt, and in response to the Kavanaugh farce, I did this.— Elle Loughran (@frizzyroselle) October 6, 2018
The scream of silenced survivors. pic.twitter.com/XDVQfv8noF
Schrodinger 'What is Life' Conference Mini-Symposium
We had the mini-symposium for the student rapporteurs to make speeches on our learnings from the conference. I did mine on Nick Lane's bioenergetics speech and waxed lyrical about connections, communion and equilibria very hippyishly...but with facts. It was a grand evening and we all got little medals and our essays on the website. The winning speeches were really good.
Halls
I moved into Halls finally! You're given it for free as a Scholar but originally I turned it down...until my housemates left and we couldn't afford to keep paying double rent. I emailed around 9th October and by the next day they had sorted me out a room! It had apparently been empty the whole time. It was a lot of stress off my back to no longer worry about rent.
Evolutionary Genetics
We had a lot of really cool lectures from Russell McLaughlin on population genetics and really not cool ones from another lecturer who I won't name on mutations.
Eukaryotic Molecular Biology
Lectures on various aspects of eukaryotic transcriptional and translational control (meh) and control of the cell cycle (cool).
Genomics
Lectures on functional, comparative and structural genomics as well as molecular biology techniques like cloning genes and making monoclonal antibodies.
One of our modules this semester is to write a 7000 word literature review. I got the top choice, Mitochondrial dysfunction and neurodegenerative disease, and met my lit review supervisor Jane Farrar on the 31st. It's pretty intimidating and I need to figure out how to narrow it down, but hopefully it'll be fun once I've done that. And it's due at the end of January so I can focus on my other assignments and exams first.
Extremely intimidated by this Lit Review I've to do on mitochondrial dysfunction and neurodegenerative disease (and by college in general tbh) but I finally read that recommended paper and made notes on my lovely whiteboard. So that's a start. pic.twitter.com/vilnhOGLdV— Elle Loughran (@frizzyroselle) October 29, 2018
Reading Week
We had midterm break so I visited my family and saw my dad, siblings, nana and my aunt over from America, and then Leon's family. Also, the election happened.
Election
I voted for 1. Michael D 2. Liadh Ni Riada and for Yes in the Blasphemy referendum, and the vote went the way I wanted pretty much as expected. So that was grand. Also, there are so many referenda!
Prison Project
I did a lot of the work on my project for my broad curriculum module on prison systems. My project is a quantitative research project using publicly available data from the European Social Survey and SPACE I report on prisons to assess the relationship between public opinion and prison policy (including sentencing and conditions).
Bioinformatics Exam
First exam of the year, making up 33% of a 5 credit module was in Bioinformatics and went OK but not perfectly. I found out in November that I got 84% on it so not ideal but not terrible.
Laidlaw Video Event
There was a showing of the videos each Laidlaw scholar had to submit about our experience in the program so far. It was a pretty fun night and it was cool that my supervisor Aoife came.
Travel Scholarship - US/Ireland Programme
I found out that I officially got the top marks last year out of the people who got into Genetics and so I got one of the US/Ireland scholarships to do a J1 in a lab in America next summer and started organising that, again with lots of help from Aoife.
Hobbies
Some swimming and knitting, though it is very hard to find time and energy for them a lot of the time. Do chats at Commons count? I don't think I read very much unfortunately, and haven't in November either. Damn college stress.
Duolingo
I hit a 100 day streak of French on Duolingo.
Halloween
Leon and I kept up our Halloween tradition by playing a new board game together, this one one that we had actually helped support on Kickstarter called Pocket Pharma!
