Survived the first week of classes

Finally, time to catch my breath...

I've had classes arranged such that on Monday I've 5 lectures/tutorials, each 2 hours and stretching from 10am till 8pm. Three classes on Wednesday; this means that for this term I'll be frantically working from Sunday till Tuesday night, and I just finished Round 1.

It's been hard to get back in the right frame of mind for studying; reading scientific papers critically is though enough, but worse still is the Mathematics for Biologists class I'm taking. Biology and mathematics occupy incompatible parts of the brain; our first assignment was a review of high school calculus that I would have taken half an hour to finish 8 years ago, but have been struggling for 3 days since Sunday to work out.

Hooray for the Master's student in statistics living on my floor.

I work better in libraries. I think it's the reminder that there are people around; when trying to work in my room I inevitably turn on MSN messenger. Thus I've been trying out a few libraries here. The Widener, the central university library, had a nice reading room with a tall skylight ceiling, but horrors, the largest academic library in the world keeps office hours. In contrast, the Lamont undergrad library is 24 hours a few days a month.

In the end, nothing compares to that veritable Nest of Nerds, Christ's College library, open 24 hours a day for most of the year.

I've started labwork too. Apparently I have an affinity for Canada, since all three of my past supervisors have been Canadian; Cambridge Part II, the one year attachment in Singapore, and now in my first rotation lab here. Only one of them was French Canadian (Oui Oui! Baguette!), and an ongoing project I've adopted is to understand from firsthand accounts the attempts by Quebec to secede from Canada. Messy, full of controversy and conspiracy, with the classic French vs English rivalry thrown in for humour. I like.

Tired, so here're some pictures for now.

The incoming students of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, 2006. The rhino's one of a pair standing in front of one of the biological buildings; apparently the rhino is our mascot.



Our class, plus a few others, dressed up for the Gala dinner for life sciences students in Harvard. Apparently one of the few occasions in our life here that we get to dress up. Back in the UK we dressed up once every 1 or 2 weeks, huh.



And the undergraduate welcoming ceremony I mentioned previously. Definitely has become part of those students' lives forever.



And here's a martini.