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December 10, 2006
Final week
Haven't been blogging lately.. kinda busy yeah.. backtracking to the time before i was in Bloomingdale IL for the retreat, i did not expect to have God guiding me through tough times, but yeah, here i am now, thinking somehow i can make it through 4 final exams... it was supposed to be 5 initially, but i got an automatic A for organic chem class.. woohoo! i'm very grateful.. grateful for many things; like recently, i applied for an internship for the spring semester.. something called Discovery Park Undergrad Research Internship (DURI)... i only started typing resume and written response only on the deadline itself! That day i was rushing here and there to get transcripts signed, to print resume, to write a supposedly 500-word response on the experiment done by the lab i'm interested in joining (in the end i managed to scribble only like 200 words) and to send them all to an office in a building i have never heard of! Of the 2 lab i applied to, one selected me for an interview. From previous experience, i thought i would be better to search for previous papers published by the professor spearheading the project (something about protein-protein interaction), so i brought the papers to the interview. To my surprise, he is actually the instructor for my organic chemistry lab this semester! (It seems like a trend that i would end up in labs supervised by professors connected to my courses) He explained a lot about the project. I thought i was about to be inebriated by his speech but at certain points i can understand what he's trying to achieve in his project. After a half-an-hour 'lecture' punctuated by my stupid (really) basic questions about jargons and analytical uncertainties, the professor told me he would only pick 2 students out of 3 that he interviewed. I thought it was a subtle hint that i was the unlucky one. But to my surprise (yet again), he replied on the next day congratulating me and saying that i was selected. Oh man, i never thought that i would land myself in a lab striving for an answer to debilitate tumor growth! I told my current lab professor that i got the DURI (hope it's not too spiky for me to handle) internship and she congratulated me! I thought she would be unhappy that i would choose to leave her lab (me the ungrateful brat who took off to a greener pasture), but she didn't even show a slight frown. Grateful, i'm very grateful.. so i decided to held on to the 2 labs next semester, expanding my horizons in 2 different fields (basic neurology and chick ear anatomy vs protein-protein interaction), which might be connected eventually (when i figured out how to). She said p53 is the protein of the year like 10 years ago, so since then many labs are focusing on it as the harbinger to the cure for tumor growth aka cancer. Me joining the new lab would be a practical exercise in searching the source of tumor-fighting strategies, something that can really help mankind! However, professor protein warned me this would not be as easy as i thought. I will only start from a small section of the project, which i will know on monday when we discussed about it. Hope i won't let him down.
Anyway, yeah, i've been searching for an answer also.. an answer to whether i should transfer to another university.. many signs point for it, but some also point against it.. kinda in a dilemma actually.. just hoping for THE sign to show up..
Just read the star online, a headline really cracked my funny bones. Go here for the trailer. I know people will start shouting 'ciplak!' but apart from the now-overrated-and-cliche superhero-based script, actually the action part seems really funky. Plus, the official site is really cool (made using Flash!) Malaysian movie production has raised its standard afterall... *standing ovation* clap clap clap.....
Posted by peixin at December 10, 2006 11:14 AM
Comments
hehe, you got the chance to play with a certain protein of molecular weight 53,000 eh?
Congratulations!
and have fun! :)
Now get out there and find us a cancer cure!
Posted by: hm at December 11, 2006 05:31 PM
Congrats Peixin.. see you in the GS490A class.. hehe
Posted by: Benny at December 13, 2006 03:52 AM