Very Good, very pleased with myself.

2/13/2007 09:03:00 pm

Well, after a pretty shitty week in terms of being sick (and just for the recond, I don't have tonsilitis anymore, but I am now starting to get a sinus infection. SWEDEN DAMNIT!) and having exams, I got my test back to find that I had a VG, which is kind of like the equivalent of an HD..I think.

So I was pretty pleased with that, especially because I had been worried about a couple of the questions in particular, for example, about B cell activation and the functions of stromal cells, which when it came down to it I was pretty sketchy on. I got really really bad marks for those questions but 10 out of 10 for my very pretty flow chart of what happens from the time of viral infection to antigen clearance. Yay for me, I'm such a nerd!

I like immuno, and the thing is I don't think that this subject is particularly hard, it's just that the workload is so full on. I'm just not used to having class every morning at 8.15 (with the same people, which is also pretty unusual) and having labs every day. Every. Single. Day.
The thing about the labs though, is that sometimes we're in there for hours just kinda...sitting around wasting time. It's fair enough that cell suspensions take time, because you have to do so many centrifuge cycles, but I have to admit that when we did our first mouse dissection and the demonstrators (who are, by the way, really nice) asked if anyway wanted to talk about it and went all earth-mothery I was a bit surprised. Not because I don't think that having to kill a small furry animal yourself and then cut it open and mash up its spleen is fairly confronting, but because I would have thought that by the time you're in a third year science course, you may have had to do dissection before. It just seems to me that at home you get all that stuff out of the way in first year, earlier really if you count the organ dissections you do in high school, so it was a little unexpected that there was an issue with it.
Not that anyone did want to talk about it (and I have to be honest and admit that I couldn't break the mouse's neck, I could put it in the isofluorane, but I couldn't make sure it was dead), but at home, by the time you've been doing biology subjects for a few years, you aren't given the option.

Anyway, I'm going to go and eat some kanelbullar. I think. I probably spelled that wrong, but it's cinnamon bun covered in this special stuff called pearl sugar. I might possible have an addiction, but DAMN, those things are good.

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2 comments on this post

  1. Anonymous3:20 pm

    Hey Ellie, Congratulations we all know your are a science wizz, your detailed descriptions of your illness tell us that. Now you have mastered science in Sweden, you can help me with the ‘special’ science subject I have to enrol in this semester, in which the major assignment is writing about the major changes that occur when cooking chocolate crackles and writing a picture book about it. There will be no labs with dead animals for me thank God.

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  2. Hmmn, sorry...can't help, I only do medical sciences...don't know stuff about chemistry...Maybe I can help with the pictures though?

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