August Update! Where I'm at: Part 1

Summer Update - August

Hey everyone, my name is Kritin and I am the one who started this blog. While I’ve never actually given an update on what I have been up to since, wouldn’t it be interesting to learn more what I’ve done? A Vile Virus Because of the pandemic, universities shifted all of their classes online. This included, not surprisingly, the biology lab classes. If you are familiar with any sort of biology experiment, you probably can imagine that students lose out on so much hands-on experience if they don’t get to, you know, do any biology. Not at all great for the students. To adjust, professors did their best to include experiment videos, lots of data analysis, and journal paper review. Spring quarter, with how hastily put together as it was, was predictably chaotic.

Where does that leave the support staff? Turns out, not a great position. Many of our duties include ordering supplies and exquipment or making the materials for experiments before lab sessions. An example: if students had to extract DNA from bacteria, the staff in charge of said class would be responsible for finding and purchasing DNA extraction kits online, partitioning out samples of bacteria for each student group, and setting up the lab with everything before. There’s a lot! Plus, UC San Diego classes are very big.

As a result, aside from some minor bioinformatics issues that I troubleshot, spring quarter was really really boring and empty. I could go on and on about all the existential crises I had, but I’ll save that for a later post about my mental health 😊 Fear not though, there’s a happy ending! University of California was nice enough to keep everyone employed through the end of June. But what happens afterward? How long would this break from in-person classes last? To keep me around, the teaching labs helped me find some temporary positions around the university (mostly around research labs). While the search took a very long time (read: three months), we finally got somewhere in July. The lab I’ve been working researches how to genetically engineer mosquitoes that can’t spread disease. Unfortunately I haven’t stayed in the lab long enough to understand completely how it all works, but when I do, I’ll be sure to come back and update! For now I do basic biology wet-lab techniques such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction), gel electrophoresis, and DNA extraction.

In addition, I will also be serving as a teaching assistant for an undergrad bioinformatics class! That will be in Fall. It’s quite the opportunity because normally only graduate students can TA, so I’m happy as a non-graduate student I get to do this. It’ll be plenty exciting too because it is my first time doing real TA work. Honestly, I’m terrified, but I want to give it my all. I’ll cover more miscellaneous things that have been going on in my life in another update – stay tuned! That should come next week.