With the passing of Labor Day weekend, its safe to say summer has come to an end ( although we still officially have about 11 days left, but who's counting?). I think the saddest part, other than the end of the season, is that I never, not even once, went to the beach :(. I guess this should make me look forward to going to the beach next time summer rolls around.
My junior year has finally dawned upon me, which is very unusual because I still have many vivid, some terrifying, and some exhilarating memories from junior year of high school. What's even more unusual is how my younger brother is actually in junior year of high school. It's as if I'm taking a trip back to yester-year every time he consults with me about college applications and talks to me about the multiple APs he's taking (Quick side note for prospective Macaulay students:http://shine.yahoo.com/event/backtoschool/10-reasons-to-skip-the-expensive-colleges-2518407/ . Its a must read!) And its a trip I know I'll be needing to make myself soon, as I will have to start looking into dental school (eek!!!), the DAT (EEEK!), and applications (swoon, faint, collapse,etc.).
As at the start of anything, I always feel its the best time to reflect and look back on the past before going on with the present ( in today's case, my biochem lab report). My summer was quite hectic, but with the more responsibilities I had, the more I valued and genuinely tried to cherish the time I had with my family and friends. And we definitely had our little adventures that made summer seem less hectic than it really was. That's one very important lesson I learned over summer: don't forget to relax, and don't forget what really makes you who you are!
I really love shadowing over the summer at LIJ. I was lucky to see oral surgery ( or, as some of the surgeons called it, "extreme dentistry", which in some cases, really is!), root canals, braces, adult and pediatric dentistry. It might sound boring to some, and it is a bit mundane at a superficial glance. But having spent well over two and a half months really allowed me to gain a deeper look into the intricacy, care, concentration, and more importantly, how varied a discipline dentistry is. I'm really feeling dentistry as a future career goal now and I'm glad this opportunity helped me reach such an important decision.
Working at the Baruch lab was an awesome opportunity as well. Field work was not exactly what I had imagined it to be, but rather, was a far greater and life-altering experience. It might sound corny to some, but working in the field actually reshaped my view of the city, in the literal physical sense (as I saw seemingly untouched ponds, beaches and parks where oysters,real, living, breathing, pooping oysters, lived), and in a greater sense, as I was able to see a city not many others know even existed.
For the laboratory, many of our data and experiments involved oysters and other bivalves that are placed in the waters surrounding the city, such as in the Hudson River, Bronx River, Floyd Bennett Field, Motts Basin, etc. Getting to the sites was quite difficult most of the time, as they were isolated within public parks and areas hard to reach by public transportation. At a quick glance, these sites are a stunning and stirring beauty, where nature exists and functions, a sight to behold immediately juxtaposed with that of looming bridges and loud airports. But once you took a closer look and walked in weighters in the waters where our oysters and clams would be in cages for data collection and experiments, you could see how the natural ebb and flow of our city's ecosystem has been pervaded in all senses by human influence. In one park's basin where we had our oysters living in cages for experiments, a power plant and the sewer system dumped water ( the power plant dumped the water used to cool down it machines, while the combined sewer overflows were letting out water after a huge storm). In that same water, people were fishing, crabbing, and swimming, ignorant of how dirty, polluted and unsafe the water was. In another body of water, we found feminine hygiene products floating next to old tar flows and thrown out toilet bowls while walking partly submerged in our weighters to get to our oysters. Even though the sites we worked at were sometimes dirty, it was a breathtaking and mind altering experience to see such a concentration of life surviving other than humans within the realm of the city. I'm glad and looking forward to working with the same laboratory team this semester as well!
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