A Revival of Sorts

Tonight, 450 miles from this room I sit in now, too lazy or tired to return to my dorm on the other side of town, 450 miles from here the Class of 2010 graduated. I don't pretend to know what it meant to them, collectively or individually, but I suspect it hasn't really hit them yet, what they just finished, what they're leaving behind more or less forever. As this new day begins, the first day on which they are no longer high school students, ANGP is in full flow. Hell, they have a whole summer to go, no need to get a jumpstart on the nostalgia.

It matters to me though. For one, I'm losing a huge anchor to a school that I love. I'll still visit, more often than most others I suspect, and there'll still be people I know, but at the end of the day I'm more or less detached at this point.

More importantly, it reminds me why I started this blog. I've been somewhat negligent, and I intend to fix that.

I've been back in Boston for nearly two weeks now. I'm spending the summer working on a systems biology project in Sean Megason's lab. We're looking at morphogenetic dynamics in the inner ear of zebrafish (the process is more or less identical to inner ear formation in humans, just at a different rate). At some point, I'll post a small summary of what we're actually doing, because I'm pretty excited about it. The project was part of an internship program in systems biology, and so my housing was organized through this program as well.

I'm also doing a part time thing from 6 PM to 10:30 PM or so on weekdays called iGEM. This is a synthetic biology competition, where each team basically decides to design a system of some sort and implements the system entirely biologically. For our project, we decided to make a touch screen that essentially produces a crystallized photograph of the pattern we draw. It's pretty neat, and I'll go into a little bit more detail on this in a future post as well.

Since I'm working pretty late on a daily basis, I don't really get a lot of chances to interact with the other people living in my dorm. I've met some pretty cool people, though, and I do have 8 more weeks to get to know them.

Anyway, today a group of us (Chris, Jessica, Five Other People, One Other Person, and I) went to watch Toy Story 3. I had already seen the first 70 minutes of this during the year at a free advance screening, but the ending was excellent, and definitely worth rewatching the first part of the movie. The first movie was obviously a classic, and the second one was excellent as well, but this one struck a chord in me that the other two missed. You should all go watch it.

Anyway, let's see how long the next hiatus lasts!

~jnub