Minimal Time, Maximum Effort

Yesterday, Dr. Fineschi mentioned we would be having a guest speaker today in lecture. That news on its own was exciting but hearing this also meant class started later than usual adding to that excitement. After a long night spent on finalizing my lab report, I went to sleep pretty late so I was really happy to get to sleep in, even if just for a little bit. 

Our guest speaker for today was Cathryn Nagler, a UChicago immunology professor. She spoke to us about the regulation of allergic response to food by commensal bacteria. The presentation was really interesting as it’s not something I had learned about before but it went by pretty quickly. The rest of our day was spent in lab although we did not really do any labs.

Once we got to lab, the first things discussed was our upcoming projects. Our second project is another lab report. This report would cover all of the labs we have done covering the study of water from Lake Michigan and would be due Monday afternoon. Unlike our last report though, it would not be a long paper reporting everything, as we do not have time for that. Instead, it’s just a few questions we need to answer about our findings. 

An example of what our poster is meant to look like

Our third and last project would be the presentation of a poster based on any topic related to infectious diseases. For this project, we get to choose both our topic and our group. My group members now are Linnea and Anna. As we just got assigned the project, we have not had the chance to meet up to discuss it in detail yet but we are thinking about focusing our topic on the plague. 

After class, I worked with Crystal shortly on our lake water lab report but I had to cut it short as I got a massive headache. I decided to head up to my dorm to take a nap and try to catch up on some of the sleep I did not get yesterday. The nap was really short but it seemed to do the trick as I woke up headache-free. My plan was to head to the dining hall after waking up but once I checked the time I realized the dining hall was already closed. Thankfully there is a restaurant on the bottom floor of the dorms so I was able to get something to eat before checking in for curfew.

Linnea and I working on our lab notebooks

The rest of the night was again spent working in the west commons study rooms. There I worked on my blog and updating my lab notebook. There is still a lot of work to be done but overall today was definitely less stressful than the past few days. With the lab report behind me, I am now looking forward to working with my new group to research our topic and creating our poster for our final project of the course.