Finally done with sem 3! :D :D :D

What a semester this has been! I hardly had time for anything else but studies! I think there was a point of time when I totally forgot that I had a blog page of my own! :O I actually forced myself once in a while to post something… ANYTHING… just to remind myself that “MG, you got a blog you need to update. Your friends and parents check this page hoping to have something to read. Even if nobody is actually visiting, you better blog. Otherwise you will forget how to!” :-\

So that explains the previous few weird posts on my blog and my absence from not just my blog, but also the ones on my blog roll.

Exams are over and holidays have started.

AND I AM BACK! WITH LOADS OF STUFF TO WRITE ABOUT!

But before I get into any of the topics that I had originally planned to write, I thought it would be a bit unfair to this semester if I didn’t mention just how hectic and nerve wrecking it was. With 4 core modules and just 1 arts module to distract you from all the hard work to be done in my major modules, life wasn’t exactly a stroll in the park. It would be impossible for me to list out all the things that I had done over this semester, so to give you an idea of how bad things got, here is a description of a particular night I promised Clueless I would blog about. I call it…. THE NIGHT WITHOUT END

It was a bright Saturday morning. Things looked peaceful and serene. A picture of tranquility…. But only the life science students knew that a storm was brewing and that they were about to be hurled right in the middle of it… on a rough sea with a tiny boat. It was THE week we had all been worrying about. Let me list the stuff we had to finish by then

1. 1 bioinformatics group project submission (worth 20% of the grades)
2. 1 Cell biology test on horribly difficult topics (worth 20% of the grades)
3. 1 Experimental Biochemistry project report (worth 50% of the grades!!!!)
4. 1 Arts and Philosophy presentation on poetry (worth 10% of the grades)

Notice the Bioinformatics project. That’s what I am gonna write about. You’d think that a group project would be easy to finish. Just divide the work and compile everything! How simple can you get! But the problem is… our group was kinda… sorta… in a way… dysfunctional. The entire group (expect 1 guy… the ONLY guy in the group) kinda realized that we were in trouble just the weekend before submission. We had split the work about a month earlier and all of us had worked hard that entire month trying to bring the project to life. We had completed our individual parts… but the compilation of everything into a group report was going to be challenging. And we couldn’t ignore the other CAs that we had. We decided then and there… Saturday would be the day we finished our mega bioinformatics project (which, we are all convinced, should be worth 50% of the grades! It was that huge!)

And so, on that bright Saturday morning, at around 9am, clueless and I trudged to the lounge in cookie monster’s block. Soleil was there too. All of us had our laptops. And thank God wireless worked in the lounge. We promptly got down to work.

And we worked…. And worked…. And worked….. and worked all day long

For lunch, I walked up to the food court, packed food for all of us and came back. We all ate as we continued working. And we worked on and on and on….

Towards the evening, we all went mad. Clueless, cookie monster and I were at the brink of banging our heads on the wall. Those two had spent the evening trying to interpret and write a convincing report on all the work we had done over the past one month and I was sitting and modeling the structures for everyone! All day we were at the same thing! We again packed dinner and on our way back to the lounge, we stopped at the mini-supermarket near cookie’s block and stocked up on more food. We decided that nobody was going to sleep till the project was done! If required, we would take turns to sleep on the couches in the lounge. But at any given point of time, there had to be someone working on the report. We desperately needed to finish this one so that we could start working on our biochemistry report which was worth 50% of a non-examinable module! (What a night mare!)

Guess at what time we left the lounge after completing our reports? We sat all through the night. We hardly slept. But we managed to finish the work…. By 6am on Sunday morning! We actually stayed back in that lounge for 21 hours straight and completed the report!

I remember telling clueless that I always wanted to stay up all night long… you know… talking, chatting, watching movies or something and stay up to see the sun rise. Well… I got the “stay up and watch the dawn” part of it. The fun part… well… its always fun to spend time with friends. But under such stressful conditions, I’d say no thank you.

Thus… the night without end, finally ended. We got that report off our hands the very next day and somehow got through the rest of the week. We were all so tired and relieved on the following Wednesday that we decided to go out and watch a movie… just to rejuvenate ourselves before the exams. We went and watched “The Prestige”. You should go and watch it sometime! Its brilliant! (I might be a bit biased in judging that movie.. I mean… c’mon… that was cuteness overdose with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale!)

Well… now that I have blogged about what a hectic semester this has been, I can move on to other topics on my mind! Watch out! I’ll be back with more! :)

This is what I got from my parents the next day!

This is what I was doing all day! Getting structures for everyone's enzyme! This is a picture of my enzyme's structure :) Clever me huh? I got the fun and interesting part to work on while others worked on... well.. not so interesting stuff!! :P (just kiddin' gals! don't murder me!)