Albion Bacterial Genomics (1/36) Day one grind

June 9th 2025

Hi! I’m Parth and I’m a rising senior, attending Bacterial Genomics at Albion College. I feel pretty lucky to be writing today’s blog since it’s the first official day at SSP; which also means it’s my first time getting ready here: first breakfast, first lunch, first lectures, and first lab. A day full of firsts. 

The morning started early, and I wasn’t used to it after coming off summer break. I got ready and headed over to the cafeteria for some light fruit. 

Today, I felt a bit nervous about the lectures and thought most of it would go over my head but I think it was pretty reasonable; we learned about antibiotic resistance and its significance for the future. We started our lab experience off by calibrating the Chemostat via an online portal to control the Raspberry PI powering it. I’ll admit my group struggled a bit with all the tubing and rotations but we were able to troubleshoot and push through, which led to me understanding the whole process much better! Sort of bittersweet I guess but that’s how labs are supposed to go.

After lunch, we learned about lab protocols and sanitization, all of which are essential to successful lab results, and headed over to the second lab of the day. My group had trouble with a lot more than the first, which was about growing photobacterium in agar plates and inoculating LB broth tubes. We were able to catch up on everything at the end though! Something fun we got to do was make our own personal drawings on the Petri-dishes and I chose to draw Spiderman 🙂

We got some time to ourselves to prepare for the first formal dinner which I thought was pretty chill overall. I got to know more about people I hadn’t really met yet and had some great conversations with our TA Nosa, and Site Director Mrs. Rochon. And that was pretty much the end of my first day, looking forward to the rest of my time here at SSP!

-Parth