Friday, July 9, 2010

Marking the End of Summer @ Brown 2010

This blog is really from Zijun Tang

Today has been a very sentimental day. 3 weeks of hardwork and friendship suddenly all came up to me and gave me mixed feelings which made my eyes turned red quite a few times.

We finally put an end to our DNA-based Biotechnology class. I got to check out my overnight culture plates today for my independent project. The result was that I could not proceed any further in the experiment because of the time limit and the failure of my bacteria growth. Through my observation of my electrophoresis gel picture, my recombinant DNA looked successful. There must be something that I did not get right when planting the bacteria. I was not the only one who did not finish his/her project and a lot of people in our class did not get the expected results. Soon we got to clean up our lab and take the final exam.

The most significant skill that I learned in my Bio-tech class is the speed of doing labs. My speed of reading and following the lab has increased because of the everyday training I received from this class. Ms.Hall is also a fabulous professor who is patient, caring, and clear about knowledge. I am so glad that I had Ms.Hall as my teacher for the last 3 weeks. I will treasure the knowledge and the lab skills.

After an early ending of our class, our friends went to pack and get ready one by one and we had to farewell to everyone, which meant more crying times for me.

I am really glad I came to Brown and got to spend my last 3 weeks with all these awesome friends I've made. Even though they are going back to where they were from -- which is all over the world -- China, Thailand, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania and etc. We come and go but our friendship and memories will stay forever.

2 comments:

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  2. Zijun,

    It's a shame that we don't have here in West County better labs to train our students so when they head off to college they're better prepared to do the lab work. As you wrote here, just over the past three weeks you lab skills have improved dramatically and the speed with which you're able to perform the lab techniques has improved.

    Speed is a double edged sword, though, in that with increased speed comes the risk of making mistakes and having your results being tossed into the trash.

    You and your classmates aren't the first and certainly won't be the last to run into time constraints in this class. It's pretty common but it helps prepare you for the real world where everyone wants results NOW and will accept no excuses for failure.

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