Monday, June 22, 2009

First Day

Finally! The end of the first day. Im really glad that my class doesn't start until 3:50. But who knows how I may feel about that later on. I have 3 teachers, one for each week. So if I get bored with one teacher at least I'll know that a differnet one is coming soon. :) The only downfall is that eventhough they said I didn't have to buy books, the teacher informed us today that we had to. :( So sad. But overall today was a good day. My class was interesting and I got to sleep in late.

Welcome to Smitty B.

It was officially the first day of class! I was surprised to see so many students, 38 to be exact. Our Intro to Psychology class is in the Smith Bouannon building but since no one knows how to pronounce it so we call it Smitty B. for short - at least that is what my RA (Room Adviser) told me to refer to it and it makes sense since it is way shorter to say.

The Smitty B. building is right next door to the Verney Woolley cafeteria so it was not much of a walk which is good for us! Unlike the rest of the other old buildings at Brown, Smitty B. has a really modern vibe to it. I adore the structure and accent of the building. We did not do much today since it was the first day besides go over the syllabus and split into groups.

It is our first day of class but we already have homework. To some extent, I actually kind of like that we already have homework. My professor, Dr.J, likes to get right to the point. I am extremely excited for the next three weeks.

This is all for now. I will get back to you all tomorrow with more stuff to blog about.

Intro to Psychology

Today was an interesting day...
It all started out in the cafeteria with tater tots to a long discussion on text messaging. In the class we took it pretty easy and just went over the syllabus and met all the students. After, we broke up into the groups with our TAs. They told us about our upcoming project and we played some fun ice breakers. Each group had to come up with a unique name, so Brendan decided that our group should be the sexy pandas which I find hilarious (Meuy is also in my group). Courtney's group is called the crazy lions and Mercedes's is the orange oranges. Cynthia was with a different TA, but she probably did the same thing also except for the fact that her pen exploded and her hand was covered with blue ink.

Besides that we had a very interesting discussion on texting while driving, and how teenagers are somehow wired differently because of our influence on technology. Then they dropped the bomb, and announced that we have to read 86 pages and write a reflection email every night. Although the reflection is easy, it takes a really long time to read all the pages (tomorrow we have 100 pages to read). So that's why we are all blogging as a group because we're still attempting to do our homework. So now we're going to go back to our homework. Good night everyone!
- Cynthia, Courtney, Mercedes, Gina

DNA

First day of class was today. It's in the biomedical building, but i think they should have called it the biomedical maze (not that it took me too long to find my class or anything. I was only like two minutes late)

Anyway, its a small class of twenty three, which will be oriented towards individual lab work. This is fortunate, because it allows us more time with the professor and TA. I'm sure, even with all of their assistance, its going to be quite a challenge. She (the professor) outlined the course for us. Labs every morning, discussion sessions in the afternoon, reading and lab reports at night.

The most exciting portion of the course, however, is going to start next week.

We will go to the health center at 8 am to get blood drawn, and then we begin an exploration of our own dna. Wow!

The summative project is based off our own DNA. We have to figure out, without any assistance from the professor, how to clone our own DNA into a vector. It sounds hard, but interesting. Who knows, maybe i'll even figure out how to clone myself.

On second thought...

I'm off to Dennis's room to enjoy the Dennis-Enis combination.

Until later,
Joseph Young

Having fun with my Lab Partner!!


First day of class, how exciting! I learned many new things in introduction to biomedical science today!

Here are a few interesting facts I learned:

- I learned that histology is the study of tissues

- I learned the bird and reptile eggs have more yolk (where the nutrients are kept in the egg) than mammalian eggs because mammalian eggs are not hatched and they dont really require lots of it because they get nutrients from their mother.

- Lastly another interesting fact is that Brown University does not offer anatomy classes instead they offer Gross Morphology.
After class was over my lab partner and I went for lunch and got to know each other better!
So I will get going because I have to do the homework!