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As the week progresses… the stress increases
It seems like as the week continues, more and more things are popping up on my To-Do List. The end of the semester is always a very stressful time for students. As I told you before, my goal for this week was to finish my 2 papers by Friday. So far one of my papers is almost completely done, and the second one I’ve been able to make an outline. So, so-far-so-good. Incase I haven’t told you about my papers, here’s what they are on. For my first paper that I have almost completed, our assignment was to research a disease, understand its pathology, and research the current treatment. After this we must come up with our own alternative way to treat the disease. It’s a kind of interesting assignment, but coming up with our own alternative way in curing the disease has become a bit tricky. My second paper that I am writing is comparing 2 short stories for my geng 248 class. Not as interesting as my first paper.
Later on this afternoon I will be meeting with my lab partner to develop a presentation that we will be giving to the class tomorrow. Our presentation will be on Rituxan, the first monoclonal antibody. Hopefully all will go well with that. Then later on tonight I will be spending most of my time studying for a quiz that I will be having at 9:30am tomorrow. As this week progresses, the work load only increases. As long as I can have my 2 papers done, it will relieve a lot of the stress that is on top of my shoulders right now.
Well I should probably get back to writing. Hope everyone is having a great week!
Posted by Kristen on November 30, 2005 02:50 PM | Link | Email Kristen
Back from Thanksgiving... 3 weeks and counting
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was so nice to be home, away from work, just relaxing. For my Thanksgiving this year I went up to New York City with my roommate to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was awesome. This has been something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. We took a 6 o’clock train from Long Island to NYC in order to get in a good area to watch the parade. Our goal was to make it as close as possible to 34th Street so that we could see the shows. We ended up making it to 35th Street. We couldn’t see the shows perfectly, but it was awesome because you could still hear all the music. Here are some pictures that I took while at the parade.
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Unfortunately break is now over and I’m forced to face the real world of college once again. We only have 2 weeks of classes and 1 week of finals left till Christmas break. This may seem like a long time, but it’s really not, especially for the amount of work that I still need to finish. So far I have 2 papers, 1 presentation, 2 quizzes, and 6 exams until I can officially declare the end of my semester. The thing that is going to be challenging is that my 2 papers and 3 out of my 6 exams all fall on the same day. I know that eventually all the work will get done, but it can become stressful. In order to tackle a situation like this you need to be able to manage your time wisely. My goal this week is to finish my 2 papers so that next week I can devote my time to studying for my exams. Of course this is all more easily said than done, but we’ll see.
Posted by Kristen on November 28, 2005 10:00 AM | Link | Email Kristen
Is it Thanksgiving Yet?
So this upcoming week is going to be nothing but crazy. It feels like all my professors have suddenly realized that Thanksgiving break is next week and have the need to assign us as much work as possible. At the current moment I have 2 papers and 2 exams to study for, which may not seem like a lot of work but it is definitely a lot of stress. I’m really looking forward to going home for Thanksgiving and spending time with my family. Another thing that I am in the process of planning with my roommate is going to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This has been something that I have wanted to do forever, so this year I’m going to try to make it happen. I am only a train ride away from the city so I figured that I might as well take advantage of it because who knows where I will end up next year.
In other news, this past weekend JMU dukes defeated the Villanova Wildcats in football. This game was so much fun. The Duke Dog rode out at the start of the game on a motorcycle which was cool. Next weekend will be our last home football game of the season. I kind of don’t want it to come because after that, it means winter is on it’s way followed by spring... and with spring comes graduation. I guess you can’t really think about that, but it’s hard not to.
Here are some pictures from the Villanova Game:
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Posted by Kristen on November 15, 2005 08:56 AM | Link | Email Kristen
Crazy Week
I have to apologize for not updating my site this past week. Many of my projects that I have been working on were due. One of the big projects that I just turned in today was a case-study report for my Epidemiology class. In this project we were given a real life topic and had to analyze it and provide the necessary calculations that are normally done in the field to determine whether or not the case we were dealing with was an outbreak. The case itself was very interesting, but also very time consuming. Once I had completed the case, I had to write a Field Report describing the case and the steps that were taken in determining whether or not it was an outbreak. The paper turned out to be more annoying than anything just because it was very tedious.
Another project that I am currently working on is for my Health Administration class. For this project we were placed into groups to analyze a real case involving a hospital. We are supposed to analyze the situation, look at how they decided to fix the problems and then provide our own recommendations on how we feel they should go about solving their problems. One thing that I have noticed, as I have progressed through college, is that the projects that I have been working on all involve real life scenarios in hopes to prepare us for the real world.
One piece of exciting news that I had just gotten yesterday involved my senior project. As most of you know I spent most of the summer here at JMU conducting lab research involving the DNA of anthrax and the purification of proteins in hopes to find a new vaccination. My lab partner and I applied for a conference down in North Carolina to present our research at the National Undergraduate Research Conference. We first had to submit our application to JMU and then JMU would decide who would be sent down to NC to represent our university. Amazingly, Nicole and I were selected which is an amazing honor. We were both thrilled when we received the email informing us of the good news.
Later on today I will be meeting with Nicole to finish up our senior thesis. We choose to write it this semester so that we don’t have the stress about it next semester. I am so excited that we are almost done. Today we plan on writing our conclusion and sometime next week we hope to write our abstract. Once this is finished all we have left to do is edit the paper and make sure that everything makes sense and prepare our powerpoint presentation. A good thing about the conference that we will be attending in March is that if we need to prepare a powerpoint presentation, hopefully we can use the same one for our thesis and that will save us a lot of time and work. Well I better get going to my meetings!
Have a great weekend!
Posted by Kristen on November 11, 2005 03:27 PM | Link | Email Kristen
Another week coming to an end...
After the craziness of the past few weeks, this week wasn’t as bad. Thankfully, I did not have that much work or any exams, which was a break. The past week was spent mostly in my bed still trying to get better from my ear infection. Most of this weekend will probably be spent trying to catch up on the all the work that I’ve been slacking on the past 2 weeks.
Work Load in Classes
In my epidemiology class, we have been working on case-studies. My professor has taken real life examples and has given us the challenge on determining on how to handle the different cases. We are suppose to determine whether the case is an epidemic, endemic, or pandemic; following this, we are suppose to analyze the case determining the attack rates as well as calculating other statistics that are normally done in the real world. After completing the calculations and graphs, we are to write a field report discussing our findings. It’s actually a kind of interesting assignment. I always feel that when professors give us real life situations and we are to analyze them, I get more out of the exercise than I do if I were to read the text book. This has been the main project that I’ve been working on and hopefully will finish it up sometime this weekend.
Something also occurred this week that I never though would. I scheduled my classes for my last semester here at JMU. I never thought that this day would come. When in college, you never really realize that there is life outside of JMU. I was looking over my transcript, trying to determine how many credits I still needed to graduate as well as what classes I was still required to take for my major. At JMU, you need a total of a 120 credits to graduate. Currently, I have 112 credits, but in order to become a fulltime student you need 12 credits. This was a huge decision for me, because of course I want to be able to enjoy my last semester of senior year since everyone always says, “These are the best years of your life”, but I still need to take classes that will prepare me for graduate school. I spent a lot of time talking with professors and discussing what classes they felt would be most beneficial to me. The classes that I decided on were: Bio224(Genetics), HSA365(Health Administration and Policy), HTH300(Medical Terminology) , ISAT 493(Senior Thesis), ISAT480(Independent Study). As you may recall this summer, I spent most of my time here at JMU working in the lab completing my internship. For this I did a lot of lab work involving Eukaryotic Expression Systems. For ISAT 480, I will be conducting research with a professor focusing on Bacterial Expression Systems which will be a great opportunity for me. Most students don’t get this type of opportunity till their 2nd year of graduate work. It will probably be very time consuming, but in the end worth it.
This pretty much concludes my work for the week. This weekend will probably be quiet, filled with chicken noodle soup and movies! Talk to everyone sometime next week!
Posted by Kristen on November 4, 2005 01:58 PM | Link | Email Kristen
