.the gpb kids.

PMB Halloween Party

Posted by Jules - October 31, 2008 at 11:10:46 pm

So we had our dept Halloween Party today, and there was a costume contest. 3 of us decided to be a “Ferrous Wheel” because we though it would be very punny (ehehe) with our Fe2+ (ferrous iron). So half an hour before the party, we made big cardboard raindrops with Fe2+ written in glitter glue, and when our turn came about, we linked arms and spun round and round to be the “wheel”. People seemed to enjoy our joke, and we almost won. The group that beat us out was a production put on by this entire lab. They were all parts of a gigantic magnetotactic bacteria. They obviously put in way more effort than us. So I was surprised by how much applause we got. I think they liked that we danced around in a circle. But next year… we shall totally own them.

Quick Post

Posted by Jules - August 25, 2008 at 11:08:37 pm

Today’s Stream of Consciousness: School is going to start in 2 days. Back to classes. Yay. I’m getting a bit stressed out thinking about grant applications, and qualifying exams. Argghhhh… time to start studying this weekend. We just had our first departmental graduate student meeting for the year. Apparently I am now a graduate assembly delegate alternate. If it’s interesting, I may go to all the meetings, regardless of whether or not the other PMB delegate is there. I’ve never been a part of student government. Last year they successfully lobbied for a vision plan to be part of SHIP, which is huge. Previously, we only had dental and health. I’m curious as to what they’ll focus on this year.

Today’s movie: Be Kind Rewind (mike watched, I only half paid attention. But it seems like an entertaining movie. I am just easily distracted today)

Today’s bedtime reading: The God of Small Things (I was vacillating between this book and The God Delusion in the bookstore. Not that they are in any way related in either subject matter or.. anything else, for the matter. Well, other than ‘God’ in the title)

San Diego and Graduations

Posted by Mike - June 23, 2008 at 05:06:08 pm

Jules and I are hanging out at the San Diego Airport waiting for our flight. We have two hours and we’re stuck in an area with a small book/magazine shop and a starbucks. Guess it’s gonna be no dinner for us!

We came down to San Diego for the weekend to see two of my cousins graduate from UCSD. Graduation ceremonies are brutal. For each one we sat in the sun for two hours roasting, listening to mediocre speeches and the names of ~1800 cheery soon to be ex students. Not sure if we got sunburned yet. I have to say that I’m glad my graduation was a small affair with shade for the spectators.

Something I thought about while watching the seemingly endless stream of new additions to the workforce was my own disbelief about graduating. It came in waves I suppose. I walked during my commencement. But then I had one more class to take over the summer. The end of that class was pretty anticlimactic. After that I got someone else to pick up my degree for me. But that’s just a piece of paper with a printed signature from the governator in a manilla envelope. Not even sure exactly where that is at the moment. I got a job with CNET later in the year, but I don’t think they ever checked to see if I had actually graduated. A few after that I got a job with Yahoo! and they did a full background check and I’m pleased to announce that in addition to actually finishing college, I have no criminal record.

Burgers, Darts, and What Have Yous

Posted by Jules - May 21, 2008 at 11:05:39 am

Yay, I’m back after cave status for awhile. Yesterday, my class finished a written test for our last required class ever. To celebrate, we all headed over to Devin’s apt, had a barbecue, chilled out, and played some Bang! One game took quite awhile, but it was fun. His place is so amazing~ I want a lemon tree!

Afterwards, we all headed out to Albany Bowl, but the wait was 30 min to an hour because of all the league bowlers! We decided to head out to Albatross instead to play darts. I was pretty horrible at first~ the darts didn’t even make it to the board! Though they did make it everywhere else- bouncing back to my feet, sticking in the carpet, the posters underneath the dart board, the wall… BUT I got way better as we played more games. Candice and I kicked butt in the end! We got 3 bulls eyes pretty early on! And consistently hit the high numbers. That was awesome. It probably helped that we were the two completely sober DDs in the group. But hey~ Playing darts also demonstrated yet again how truly nerdy we were. We changed our team names every round on the scorekeeping chalkboards. Matt, Devin and Emily called themselves MeSA (hormone that instigates plant defense, among other things). We (Candice, Josh and I) combated by calling ourselves SABP2, the esterase that cleaves MeSA. They counteracted with MeSA +SA, which we countered with SABP2 + JA (jasmonic acid antagonizes SA plant defense). And so the cycle goes.. We are nerdy… yeah…

So all in all, I spent around 12 hours straight with these guys. And I have to say that I love hanging out with my class~ you couldn’t find a better group of people who get along so well. We’re all so different, but we all mesh really well together. How lucky am I?

When You Take Abbreviations Too Far

Posted by Jules - April 3, 2008 at 12:04:29 pm

We have to read a lot of papers for class. You can tell when they write them without keeping the general reader in mind. The only people who could read through that quickly are the people who work in that area. Is it really necessary to tell us the exact vector construct they created in the figure caption? With everything abbreviated so that we have to keep referring to other parts of the text? I don’t think so.

I’m Flying to Seattle this Weekend!

Posted by Jules - October 8, 2007 at 04:10:51 pm

I’m planning on visiting my siblings this coming weekend in Seattle. Which shall be fun.

Unfortunately, my sis will be studying for her LEED exam (unless she decides to postpone it) this weekend. Alas. But hopefully I’ll get some good oyster and crab eating in with the siblings. Mmmmm… oysters. I’ll also be visiting a high school friend that I haven’t seen in years! We first met during swimming class at the YMCA when I was in elementary school. I proceeded to kick her sister in the face while swimming the front crawl. I swear I didn’t know anyone was behind me! And I didn’t even know their names. In high school orchestra, we met once again. Her first words to me were, “Oh, I remember you! You’re the one who kicked my sister in the face!” So not a great first introduction. Haha… but it will be good seeing her again. Good times, good times.

Hopefully I shall also be working on my grant proposal for fellowship applications this year. I really need to get cracking on that, because the applications are due early november! I’d like to have a good working draft by sunday so that I can bring it in and get it torn to shred by the profs that be. It’s nice that I have some preliminary data to include though~ it makes this proposal seem slightly more feasible when you actually have something to go by.

The Graduate

Posted by Mike - September 4, 2007 at 01:09:37 pm

Jules told me last night that she was assigned a paper to read by one of our old graduate student instructors, Keith Slotkin. Apparently he published a paper in the June 2005 issue of Nature Genetics under the title Heritable transposon silencing initiated by a naturally occurring transposon inverted duplication. And according to Google scholar, it has been cited 12 times since then.

Maybe one day I’ll come up with some kind of crazy HTML, CSS or JavaScript method which people will use. They’ll call it the Horn Method… actually that sounds silly. I’ll have to think of something better.

Route

Posted by Jules - August 28, 2007 at 04:08:16 pm

My route to school is infinitely easier than Mike’s. The bus stop is only a few blocks away, and the 1 transfer I have to do is fairly painless and well timed. The bus also comes every 10 ish minutes or so, so it’s not an enormous pain if I miss one. I find it odd that the BART costs less ($1.40) to get to Downtown Berkeley than the bus ($1.75 +$0.25 Transfer) since it’s much faster; it’s a good thing Berkeley provides the Class Pass so I don’t have to pay for bus fare every day. It’s also nice that I can sit down and read my books and journals en route. If only I didn’t get woozy while reading in a vehicle. I’m gonna need to work on that.

Jr High Aspirations

Posted by Jules - August 14, 2007 at 04:08:28 pm

I’m cleaning out my old room at my parent’s house, getting rid of excessive paper and making a half hearted attempt at finding my Jane Goodall signed copy of National Geography (I’ve done this every year for years. Where could it be???). I came across this packet from junior high, which appears to be a junior high portfolio of some sort, containing various reflections, reports, and artwork.

I remember making these in art class. We carved sheets of linoleum and glued them onto woodblocks to use as stamps. I made a maple leaf stamp (I like maple leaves), a frog stamp (ditto), and stamps carved with my dad’s last name (曹 - Cho) and my mom’s last name (朱 - Chu).

Map of oregon. I even drew in a little bean in the key and the map to represent where all the bean farms were. As you can see, my key was rather extensive. I’m guessing I spent way too much time on that map.

Ah yes, the infamous teen pregnancy reports everybody had to work on in junior high. I think my favorite part about that assignment was locating the proper magazine pictures to dress up my report with. In the first section, we had to write down what our aspirations were, and our parents were supposed to fill out what they aspired for me. To sum it up:

Me (my goals only go up to 22 yrs of age, apparently):

-Be a straight 4.0 student in HS.
-Volunteer as a candy striper at a hospital.
-Join the Volleyball team at Clackamas High. Failed. I think volleyball camp the summer after jr. high traumatized me.
-Get into Orchestra A.
-Get into Portland Youth Philharmonic.
-Make new friends. I became way more confident and much less shy in hs. Now I have no shame, bahahahah…
-Become more athletic. FAIL FAIL FAIL.
-Get a driver’s license.
-Take all the math and science classes that I could possibly take. Well, I guess I missed honors biology in hs. Stupid class conflicts.
-By age of 22, complete my bachelor’s degree and be working towards a masters in science engineering.
-Have my own car.

I guess I completed most of those goals, minus the athletics ones and the possible engineering aspirations. So not bad. My goals were definitely short term though. How come I don’t have any long term goals???? I guess 22 seems a long ways away when you are 13.

Mom’s aspirations: I want my child to be happy, bright, eager to learn, have a good education, and know what happens around the community and the world. I want her to talk to her parents as friends and let them know about her life, work, friends, school et cetera et cetera.

Dad’s aspirations: I want my daughter to be well educated and informed in what is going on in the world. I want her to be good at whatever musical field of medical field or whatever she does (I don’t recall ever wanting to make a career in either of those fields) But first of all, I want her to go to a good college like MIT.

So in summary, I think they wanted me to be a streetwise punk. [Out]

Health Insurance

Posted by Jules - July 17, 2007 at 05:07:20 pm

So on the 16th of July, University Health Services sent out a serious toned email stating that the last day to cancel Student Health Insurance (SHIP) *will be* the 15th of July (everyone got that?) or fines would be incurred. This understandably made some people a little confused and concerned. One of the incoming fall graduate students asked our student advisor about whether we have to pay for health insurance ourselves.

To which our student advisor replied:

We cover it. Silly university always sends out vaguely threatening emails. We’ll be paying for that until you graduate.

[Student Advisor]

Hehe… well, at least I thought it was funny. >_>

I took a look at the UHS SHIP web page after the vaguely threatening email was released, and noticed that filing fee students have to pay way more per year (people who are done with all classes and research, and only have their final dissertation/thesis to write). I guess it encourages them to finish quickly.

UCB undergraduates $610 per semester
UCB graduate and international students $805 per semester
Filing Fee Students (out of Bay Area) $1,255 per semester
Filing Fee Students (in Bay Area) $1,510 per semester
Mills undergraduate $1,146 per semester
Mills graduate and international students $1,237 per semester

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