Spent large portions of the month tearing my hair out (figuratively) over writing two lab reports that made up a whole module worth 5 credits. It took so long to figure out how to do the particular kind of bloody error bars I needed, and then to figure out gel labelling, and then printing double-sided and making sure the arrows to the gels showed up in the printout, but eventually I got it done, printed, bound and handed in on time, which was a relief.
PRISON PROJECT
I had done the bulk of this in October but finished off my prison
DATA HANDLING
The bulk of my data handling module (one third each Python, ChIP-seq which is mostly command line use, and statistics) took place during November. I really enjoyed Python, quite enjoyed stats and do not (because I still have to do the project for it) like ChIP-seq, even though I'm familiar with the command line - it's the biological interpretation that's the issue for me.
JS CAREERS TALK
Someone from the TCD careers service came and gave us a talk about internships we could do over the summer on 5th November. Some of it was a bit annoying, like when she asked why people might not be on LinkedIn and didn't understand when I said because LinkedIn shows little respect for data privacy, but overall she did go through a lot of different opportunities. I am very glad I already have two internships sorted for next summer, because so many of these required seeking something outside the country.
GENSOC PUB QUIZ
The genetics society held a fun pub quiz on the 7th that loads of us (undergrads and postgrads and the odd lecturer) went to and really enjoyed. We did come fifth last but I didn't care - I got the very last answer, which I was unsure about (which of Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang got the CRISPR patent or something), right, and had a lot of fun during the music round listening to some NOW 74 classics.
LAIDLAW LEADERSHIP DAY
On November 10th, the Laidlaw scholars went to a coworking space near Trinity to do a leadership day. We first heard a panel discussion from someone who works for the Green Party, who was cool, a guy who works in VR/AR, and a filmmaker. We then did a session with Linda Doyle, who's the Dean of Research at Trinity. It was frustrating but quite good - we had to describe our research using only the 1000 most common words, which is basically impossible, and do a postcard symbolising the possible impact of our research. I felt like that was kind of silly because some research is just because it's valuable for humans to expand our knowledge, but I did think of an interesting thing about my codon usage bias research re the importance of understanding why our genome - with all its weird patterns of codon and GC bias, the transposons, duplications, etc - functions the way it does before we try to mess with it with gene editing that could have pleiotropic effects.
Finally, we had a three-hour session on resilience which was not good at all - the speaker kept getting science wrong, like saying things are passed down via 'gene cells' and - to the amusement of the med scholars - drawing a heartbeat trace wrong, as well as lots more pseudoscience and faux-deepness and saying things like 'failure doesn't exist' when, in the context of our lives within a college environment with rigid failure rules, it very much does. He also said you can't say someone is an angry (or anything else) person, just a person who gets angry sometimes, and the poor guy was argued with a lot about that. I know maybe the science terms nitpicking sounds petty, but I wouldn't do that if I was happy with the rest of the talk, and sadly I was not. The rest of the day was good though, and it was cool to see the other scholars again.
J1 RESEARCH INTERNSHIP
Aoife put me in touch with Emilia, a scientist at Brown University doing cool work in computational genetics, which was exactly what I was looking for, and Emilia and I had a Skype call in mid-November to start sorting out details. I am very excited that I'll get to do a project on the population genetics of the X chromosome. I am less excited about figuring out when to go, my flights, and the visa, but it must be done.
FUNERAL
My grandfather died and I went back to go to his funeral. It was sad and got me thinking a lot about death and the pointlessness of it. It was nice to have a family reunion, though.
BIOINFORMATICS EXAM GRADE
I got my bioinformatics exam grade back on 19th November (the lecturer kindly emailed it to me - I didn't want to walk over to the noticeboard because I'd hurt my foot) and I got 84%, which isn't amazing but is pretty solid.
PYTHON EXAM
On 27th November, I had my Python exam, which was worth 33% of a 5 credit module. It went well and was pretty fun - I like that I get to code for credit. While I only found this out in December, I got 97% in it.
CHRISTMAS COMMONS
I had been looking forward to bringing my dad and his partner to the much-hyped Christmas Commons to show them how fancy it is, but Dad was sick so I brought some friends instead and still had quite a nice time so I'm glad they could join me.
STUDY
Obviously, I spent a lot of time studying as exam week started on December 10th. Because my more lecture-heavy modules Evolution and Genomics had finished in October, it was easier to keep up with writing up lectures and study, so I was quite happy about that.
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