A Gracious Half Work Day

Hello! I hope whoever’s reading this is having a great day 🙂

Let me introduce myself. I’m Susanna, 17 years old, an ENFJ, and incredibly lucky to be here at this amazing program, surrounded by awesome friends, the coolest teaching assistants, and the swagiest faculty. Today officially marks Day 13 of my journey at SSP. Although each day feels incredibly long thanks to our packed schedule of lectures and labs, I can’t believe it’s already been almost two weeks. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know everyone—it genuinely feels like I’ve known the people in the cell biology program for at least a year already.

Anywho, I started the day by waking up at 7:15 a.m., after snoozing my 6:30 alarm at least three times (my bad to Zoe, my roommate). I did the usual: brushed my teeth, got dressed, and headed off to the lecture room. But then, I was hit with the unexpected. It’s hard to say whether it was good or bad news… or maybe both?

I’m not sure if you’ve read Leshi’s blog post on our field trip to a water reclamation site. If you haven’t, you should go check it out to understand this next part 🙂 Dr. Catalan announced that we’re going on a mini field trip on Wednesday (yippee!), but this time to a different water reclamation site in Las Cruces. Apparently, on our previous trip, we were supposed to take water samples to use in our yeast labs. Whoops….

Now, the prospect of hands-on learning and independent experimentation is exciting… but I do wonder if this is a little too hands-on. Personally taking test tubes to collect water filled with human feces is, to say the least, not the most glamorous thing I’ve ever done. Still, I am grateful to SSP for giving us this opportunity. I mean, this really is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. And if I do ever find myself collecting water from a sewage treatment plant again, I can at least say I’ve had experience. That has to count for something, right?

On a serious note, I found myself reflecting after hearing Dr. Catalan speak. Since we’d already been to the water reclamation site, most of us were not exactly thrilled about going again. The idea of seeing poop a second time? Not ideal. But then he mentioned how many of his friends in the medical field have faced all kinds of things—blood, vomit, diarrhea, you name it. That really stuck with me. I realized that I won’t always be in the most comfortable or glamorous situations, especially in the medical field, which is what I want to go into. I started thinking about the whole thing in a more positive light after that (optimism!!).

The rest of the day was peaceful and honestly pretty fun. We had a journal club (which is basically a discussion on a research paper we read) and did some activities with CRISPR, a genome editing technology. Then we were free to do whatever we wanted! I actually made some friendship bracelets with some beads I found in the commons room 🙂

Yeah, so that’s pretty much it. Thanks for reading!
Susanna out ✌️

Susanna Kim