Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone!

We made chocolate covered marshmallow spiders!

And carved pumpkins!

The end.

I love life.

Why am I a biology major?  Because I love life.  I love living, I love being alive, and I also love studying life.  It’s crazy all the things that living organisms can accomplish!  It’s so intricate, complex, and specific; it’s astounding!

I do not know what I want to do with my life, but I do know that I like biology.  I’ve always pictured myself working in the genetics or biotech field, and who knows that still may happen, but I like ecology too because you get, or try to get, more of the “big picture” as far as what is going on in the world and how everything is interconnected.  Next July I’ll be going on CO-OP** instead of taking classes, and I’d really like to come home for that.  I’ve spent the past couple days beginning the process of finding a job and I’m excited about all the possibilities.    

Today I went to Nahant to visit Northeastern’s Marine Science Center for my Ecology Lab.  It was like the 5^th grade Homer field trip all over again.  Except this time instead or running along the beach ecstatic after finding a sea squirt,* we were walking along the coast examining the various species of snails, barnacles, and crabs, by their Latin names of course (not sure I felt the same exuberance as before – but still it was pretty cool).  We got to see the experiments underway; cages tethered to rocks; heating bulbs over Tupperware full of crabs, snails, and barnacles; and various other contraptions enclosing the ideas and tests of faculty and students alike.  They even had a bunker containing an entire skeleton of a whale.  So, pretty cool day.

Also – this is my 100^th post!  I’m considering that an accomplishment…

*My group name was the “Squish Sea Squirts,” so naturally finding a real live sea squirt was just about the best possible thing on the planet.

**This is a program that is a central part of school’s structure and in my five years here I will spend three, six month periods on CO-OP working in a field relative to my major.

Cholesterol

I lot of people hate Organic Chemistry – and this may be grounds for defining me as a nerd – but I think it’s actually kind of cool.  Like in lab this week we took olive oil, which is an unsaturated fat, and mixed it with cyclohexene and palladium to turn it into a saturated fat!  That’s like the kind of thing that scientists do in real life, not sophomore biology students in a lab.  One week we built this crazy contraption of various glass tubes to distill a mixture of cyclohexane and toluene.  One week we separated the components of an Excedrin tablet; when we were done we had aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine in three separate test tubes!  Anyway, yesterday I had my second Orgo test and it wasn’t even that terrible, which is surprising considering I spent the night before constructing cholesterol from my molecular model kit instead of memorizing addition reactions of alkenes.

Cholesterol!

In other news, biology is awesome, which I will expound upon in a future post.