Answering some questions

Answering some questions Questions 1. Sevi asked, here is a question for you about MacGregor rooms size. I consider MacGregor as my first choice in housing lottery, but some slarifications is needed. What is it in feet/meters, approximately (or, exactly sizes, if known)? Is it possible to find in Internet the floors layouts? Then, on internet connection. Does MacGregor have wireless access in all rooms? According to the mit wireless access map, it has, but on the page about MacGregor housing there is only wired connection is mention. Whom to believe? :) If it has no wireless access, is it inconvinient, how do you think? A MacGregor room is eight feet by fifteen feet. Im not sure how high the ceilings are, but I guess they must be at least eight or nine feet high. MacGregor does have wireless coverage all the dormitories do now. It might not be listed in other places because the wireless for many dorms was just put in last summer. There is a website with floorplans for MIT buildings, but I think its only accessible on campus. I dont actually know, because Im never on the internet off campus. :) 2. Christina asked, Is it bad if we cant understand what most of this actuallyis? :-X Nah, youll find out soon enough. :) The one-line version is that a lot of the experiments I do involve getting cells to take up foreign DNA or RNA, and I can do that using a variety of methods. 3. Danielle asked, Can we install our own window ac in any dorm room on campus? and when you do the procedures in the lab, do you have an instructions sheet to go off of or do you know what youre doing like the back of your hand? when do you get to learn how to do all this anyways? Yes, you can install a window AC in any dorm and you dont have to pay for electricity in the dorm, so you can use it as much as youd like, too. In MacGregor, you have to do a little bit of maneuvering since the windows in the high-rise have screens, but its not too terribly complicated. I use both methods in the lab when I learn a new technique, I write all the steps down (or copy a page out of somebody elses lab notebook), but Ive done most of the protocols so many times that I dont have to look at my notebook anymore. If I need to learn a new protocol, I usually ask one of the postdocs in the lab to show it to me, then try to do it myself the next time I have to do it. Ive learned a lot of protocols (and a lot of protocol-independent common sense) in the past three years. 4. Anonymous asked, I bet you found yourself using a couple tenses, picked one of them, and went back to meticulously change all the ones already in the tense you decided against using. But I must ask you, why present if its all past stuff? Haha, I actually wrote that whole thing in the present tense, although admittedly it was because I was modeling it off this entry, which I wrote in past tense and then went back to change. Present tense just sounded better to me. 5. Melodie asked, If theres one advising seminar that I really, really, really want to take, and Im ok with two others, should I just sign up for one for the lottery, or do all three? The usual line given about lotteries at MIT (eg the HASS-D lottery) is that putting extra choices wont diminish your chances of getting your first choice I think in both lotteries, theyre not trying to maximize everyones happiness, but theyre just trying to get everybody into a HASS-D/seminar. So go ahead and put the other two as your second and third choices they shouldnt affect the probability that youll get your first choice. 6. Jon asked, So now a question, when did you decide that you wanted to be a scientist when you grew up? I actually did some research to answer this one, and the best answer I can come up with is that I decided I wanted to be a scientist after reading A Brief History of Time in sixth grade. At the time, I wanted to be a physicist (those of you who know me, Ill give you five seconds to stop laughing) since then, I have wanted (sequentially) to be a research psychologist, a geneticist, a cognitive scientist, a behavioral geneticist, and a cellular neurobiologist. You can sort of see it as a periodic wave oscillating between biology and brain science, and finally settling right on the interface. :) 7. Anonymous asked, Are buildings and dorms on the West Campus connected by underground tunnels, as buildings on East Campus are? To my eternal dismay, no. I have always wanted a tunnel under Amherst Alley along dorm row, because wouldnt that be a super idea? I guess we have the Tech Shuttle, but it is just not the same. And thanks again to all of you for your congratulations. :) Post Tagged #MacGregor House