It seems like fall has come so all of a sudden. One day it was hot and sunny, and the next it was cold and dreary. Normally I wouldn't mind, I actually like fall a lot better than summer, BUT I really need to finish collecting all my insects. This picture was taken probably three weeks ago at Carol's, where I've collected a few times before. Even back then a lot of the plants were dead, and that means there were not many bugs. I ended up bringing home only a couple wasps and one butterfly. Now the weather is ten times worse, and I'm really scared that my collection is going to stink. It's rained almost every day this past week, and I don't think the coming weeks are going to get any better! My professor keeps telling us everyday that we should have our collection done by now and that we need to start identifying them. Ugh. So if anyone has any silverfish, cockroaches, or earwigs, stick them in ethanol and send them my way! It seems like those should be really easy insects to find, but I haven't come across a single one!
I have a research project proposal due for Cell Bio next Thursday, and I really don't know what to do. No one in the class does. It's very hard to understand my TA and she really doesn't explain things well, especially this project proposal. All we were told is that we have to come up with this project and it has to involve one of the techniques we've used in lab. If I am going to do electrophoresis where do I get the DNA from? If I'm going to do fluorescence where do I get cells from? She told us to go and look at research papers, but I know there's no way we can do anything that complicated in this lab. It's kind of frustrating because I want to do something more involved than just putting some DNA samples into a well and watching them migrate. It just seems pointless to do a research project if it's not going to challenge us.
I remember being in foundation classes and thinking, "When am I going to learn how these things actually work instead of just learning watered-down simplified versions of everything? Oh, I bet I'll learn them when I get in upper level courses." Well I'm in those upper level courses now and I am still thinking the same exact thing.