Emotions and new experiences


In these past three weeks, I don’t think I’ve discovered as much about memes, social media challenges, videos, and random things about my friends as I have now. I think my emotions have come in waves when I think about what’s happened and they cycle back starting from shock about what’s happened to fear about what’s going to happen to worry about what I’m doing to a drive to learn more to hope and gratitude for the people out there doing anything from collecting garbage to treating patients to developing the tests and vaccines to trying to do something or anything. And it goes back as soon as I look at that one picture of the purell stand in front of MIT or look at some photos from just a month ago. When I got back home from MIT, I honestly couldn’t sleep… so I started to build on a doc I had started at MIT to comfort myself more than anything but also to organize my thoughts (it’s now a 22 page doc of info and graphics about everything from informative videos to the science behind the preventative measures to the science behind the virus to open source initiatives that global groups started). I don’t know if that was the best decision for me at the time, but as someone who is very visual, it helped to build a profile of the virus, almost like the assays we do in 20.109 to identify different characteristics of a protein or verify a plasmid was correctly made! Something I found really cool was how some of the RNA purification based methods of diagnostics actually use some of the same tools we used in the lab. In any case, that and reaching out to people about information on the doc and getting the chance to connect and talk with people who I never would have otherwise, be it high school friends or even new friends from Australia, Japan, or Uganda through After iGEM. It’s also been really fun to play games with friends and family, like skribbl.io and mahjong with my grandparents, mom, and little sister. My hope is to get the chance to learn some more dishes from my grandmother, the most recent was making dumplings, and also get the chance to sketch more frequently.Finally, I wanted to share this funny video I saw on a cool Slack workspace called Remote Academia that made me really appreciate all the things that professors and teachers across the globe are doing right now!: I Will Survive, Coronavirus version for teachers going online(Apparently I Will Survive is also a good handwashing song to sing to!)Here are a few photos of my most recent sketches (from about two weeks ago since this past week has been focusing on figuring out to be hosed while still at home):
Elephant from IAP trip

A little bit of hope (based off a Borderline mural in the tunnels that I took a picture of and used as !)

And some fun memes that I saw (that I also tried to translate and explain to my grandmother): 
(I don’t have cat but I wish I had a pet with me)
(MIT OCW is can be humorous) 

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