October was busy but cool, with three of its four Saturdays filled by fun extracurriculars. The highlight was probably going to London for the Laidlaw Conference, and the lowlight slogging through the lit review that turned out to be a lot less fun than it appeared.
Laidlaw Scholarship
This month was very busy with Laidlaw events, and quite enjoyable.
On October 5th, we had our final Leadership Day, which involved a panel from the Spunout founder and a community leader, a workshop on emotional intelligence, and a debate. Our team had to propose that disruption is a force for good in the world, so we talked about political revolution, entrepreneurship and scientific progress. I was concerned the other team would bring up the very valid counterpoint that human expansion has been terrible for the rest of life, but instead they did something very entertaining: each brought up a laptop and a book and read out quotes from them. The books were The Power of Now and the Bhagavad Gita and their point was that we can't know what good is, shouldn't presume we can, and shouldn't attempt to do anything in the world but instead be detached from it. So that was interesting.
The next weekend, we went to London for the Laidlaw Conference in UCL. There were some good talks and a lot of fairly fun socializing. Also, we were on our way to the pub but Extinction Rebellion were blocking the road so we joined in, and then a load of police surrounded us with more arriving all the time. It was bizarre - we were just singing in the street but they seemed to feel the need to bring out every policeman in existence.
Finally, a week and a half later, we had our Laidlaw graduation in the East Dining Hall, then went out. We first went to someone's apartment for a while, where I got to chat to one of the scholars I hadn't gotten to know well before, and met my friend's brother who works in sales. We were both interested to talk to each other because we do such different things.
Schols
I talked to a girl I know from school about preparing for Schols, and had the first meeting with the Schols Accessibility subcommittee.
Writing
I wrote the second draft of my novel over the month from mid-September to mid-October:
Then had the rest of October to prep for first-drafting my new novel for NaNoWriMo (not that I got much done because of the bloody lit review).
College
I can't believe this is the year I'm placing less emphasis on college! Anyway, in college in October I had lectures on:
- Molecular Evolution II
- Human Evolutionary Genetics
- Bacterial Molecular Genetics
- Principles of Genetics
- Plant Developmental Genetics
- Prion Diseases
- Genetics & Immunology of Neural Diseases
- Gene Therapy & Transgenic Animals
- Stem Cells
My favourite was Molecular Evolution, of course, but Plant Dev and Stem Cells are cool too.
There is an utterly horrific amount of animal abuse in science, though, and our new block of lectures reminds me of that every day.
I wrote up lectures decently for the first half of October, getting the courses from the first block (Mol Evol, Human Evolution, Bacterial) fully written up by early November, but I have not studied the current courses well. I spent the second half of October working intensively on my lit review titled 'Horse Genomics and Origins', which sadly meant I got no break in Reading Week (well, I took one day off once I finished it, the Bank Holiday, but sure that's less than even a weekend). Perhaps the lesson is that spontaneity is not actually necessarily good, and that what sounds like a fun project ('horsies!') may not be so you should just stick with your original plan (machine learning in genomics) instead?
Research
I've been working on the project I spent ten weeks on during my internship in America. While I have a lot to do, it feels good to be back working on it and talking to my supervisor about it rather than avoiding it!
Climate & Activism
By the end of October, I reached Week 6 of weekly climate striking (#FridaysForFuture) on Fridays outside the Dail.
I also became a Youth Advisor for GOAL and attended the first of three workshops there all day on Saturday 26 October.
Other Extracurriculars & Public Speaking
I did two talks for Netsoc about data analysis and visualisation in R, and as Secretary have been doing the usual minuting/emailing stuff.
Socialising
GenSoc
family
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