When I was in school and working part-time, I found myself struggling; unsure of how to plan out my days and my tasks without completely overwhelming myself. I failed to keep the balance at the beginning, inducing burn-out, stress, anxiety, and more. When you're in school, there may be a number of things happening in [...]
Category: University
5 Lessons from 5 Years in Post-Secondary Schools
My Journey to be an MLA/T
When I was in my third year of university, I had discovered and fallen in love with this amazing scicomm community. At the time I focused my blog and Instagram about my experiences taking bioinformatic and biotech courses, with a bit of insight into sustainability (since I was living away from home at the time) [...]
An Old Lab Book
Two years ago I posted a little blog post talking about my feelings and excitement in taking a 6-hour molecular biology lab course. I mentioned it once afterwards, then never again. So here’s a summary of what we did, how I felt during the course, and afterwards! This course comprised of one 2.5 or 3 [...]
A Reflection on Undergrad
Pursuing an undergrad is a very unique experience that can vary for everyone. Beginning that journey feels like there is a very long road ahead, filled with a number of challenges and achievements. As exciting as it is when ending that journey, it can be a really confusing and overwhelming time. After 4 long years, [...]
Attending President’s Lecture featuring Donna Strickland
On Wednesday, January 30th my friends and I attended the University of Waterloo's President's Lecture featuring 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Donna Strickland. We listened to her talk about her research and how it led her to develop chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her Ph.D. supervisor. Her lecture was then followed by a small Q&A [...]
New Year, New Goals
Assignment story: The CALM1 gene
I recently looked at my personal blog and saw that I had an unpublished blog post there that contained a bunch of screenshots and had only one sentence incomplete sentence: "like damn it. why did my gene have to be so awesome and conserved?????" I thought it may be more relevant placing this entry here [...]
Fear of Group Work
I haven't had much group work experience during my undergrad studies so far. Disregarding lab partner work, there was really only two instances of group work I can think of, and those moments were back in my first year. The first one a group research and presentation (on peroxisomes), and the second instance was just [...]
Learning to Code
From May to August, I learned how to functionally code using DrRacket. Functional programming: "treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data." I found it really interesting to code. I found myself constantly pushing myself to remember the built-in tools we learned in class, and the multiple ways we [...]