Two Days in the Life by Elizabeth Choe '13

Yo homez, I’m back! And guess what? I’m a senior.

I.

AM.

A.

SENIOR.

I walk down the halls of Simmons and see freshman frantically p-setting even through they’re on Pass/No-Record, and I think to myself, “hahahaha n00bs” and then immediate proceed thinking, “Wait I’m not one of you anymore,” which leads to internal sobbing and then I’m jolted back to reality when I inevitably run into the door frame. I wake up in the morning feeling like P.Diddy, then realize, “Ermegerd, this is my last sixth day of school EVER!” (Just kidding, but it does start each day off rather epic-ly.) It also means that people ’round these parts assume I know some stuff about stuff. I haven’t decided how I feel about this.

Actually, things have been pretty business as usual, thank goodness. Take my last two days, for example…

Figure 1. Thursday

1a) First stop in the morning. 3.055 Biomaterials Science and Engineering. Not sure if there are any readers out there who remember back in the day when I used to doodle in my notes. The doodling kind of stopped last semester, so I decided to dig up some notes from the other day in class and add a little something to them. Just. For. You. All things for the greater glory of blogging. Fun fact No. 1: I fell in lurve with biomaterials last fall after taking 20.441 Biomaterials-Tissue Interactions. Fun fact No. 2: One of the professors of this class lives in my dorm as a Resident Scholar. Fun fact No. 3: She’s my high school math teacher’s doppelganger.

1b) Lecture for 20.309 Measurement and Instrumentation for Biological Systems, followed by the entire afternoon spent in lab. Lab 1 is to build a fluorescent microscope. Our team managed to bolt down our “first draft,” after which one of the instructors pointed out that we’d kind of built the whole thing incorrectly… OOF STORY OF MY LIFE.

1c) A quick dinner is followed by MITSO rehearsal. I creepily snapped this photo while we were filing out of sectionals. Dvorak has a way of redeeming 4 hours of epic-lab-fail-time.

Figure 2. Friday (Day)

2a) First stop in the morning. After frantically reviewing some protocols, I bike over to the Koch Institute for some par-tay time at the Langer lab, where I UROP. I work for a post-doc on nanoparticle drug delivery. He fist-bumps me every time I see him. DID I LAND THE AWESOMEST UROP OR DID I LAND THE AWESOMEST UROP? (Answer: I landed the awesomest UROP.)

2b) I call this one, Wait Wut Why Do My MIT Notes Look Like Dis? This summer I was looking over my degree requirements and realized I was one class away from getting a music minor. So I was all, okay harmony and counterpoint, YOLO. (Please don’t smack me. I promise to never say that again.) After finishing some ligation reactions in the morning, I ran over to the piano lab component of 21M.301, where I spent an hour lamenting that I never practiced my scales (they’ve literally come back to haunt me every year since I’ve been in college) and apologized to the instructor for my hilariously shameful theory knowledge.

2c) Bolted from piano lab to some more 20.309 lab lecture, where I learned about signal noise (and by “noise” I mean “everything-that-can-and-will-break-everything-you-attempt-to-make-this-semester-and-cause-you-to-commence-self-loathing”). Ate lunch with a 309 classmate, talking about how awesome summer was and bracing ourselves for the impending misery of the semester. (Just kidding. Seriously. It won’t be that bad, right?) Ran back to 309 lab, where my partner and I literally went back to the drawing board, fixed our sad little ‘scope, and reached a local maximum of success. Science – it 10% of the time, it works every time.

Figure 3. Friday (Night)

3a) Friday nights in college. I mean, this is a normal experience, right? People building a super-secret project in the basement of a dorm, other people creeping/blogging about it… normal, right?

3b) …Projects involving 12 new TVs, drilling, design, programming…

3c) …I mean, normal, right?

Figure 4. Friday (Night, continued)

4a) ABNORMAL. MIT students referring to the product manual. Wut. Iz. Dis. Madness.

4b) The cruise-ship captain of this project. You might recognize Cosmos as the director of behind putting Colbert on notice (actually, that’d be colossally creepy if you did, as he’s never in the video…).

4c) Productivity. I am an immensely valuable asset of moral support and tomfoolery. Are any of you wondering what these goobers were up to last night? Well, I guess you’ll just have to check the blogs soon to find out…

HOOK LINE AND SINKER, SUCKERS.