Nik

One word to describe it: Whirlwind. Yeah, my week has kind of been everywhere. I was able to attend both Honors Primetime and On Iowa! These programs were both incredibly fun and rewarding. Primetime was my first real taste of a college course. A group of students interested in the science field and I worked closely with a professor to learn about “DNA and Disease”. Specifically we learned about Microarray technology, and Alzheimer’s disease. I had never even heard of Microarray technology before, as I am sure many of you have not, but it was actually pretty interesting. Shortly, it deals with how the genes in your DNA are displayed. We worked with some pretty cutting edge software to find what genes are related to Alzheimer’s disease. Then we matched our results with the results of scientists that had contributed their information to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The genes we found matched up fairly well, so I would say the project was quite a success.

Now, if you don’t like science, that might have bored you. Sorry about that, but I had to. Now we can talk about a program that even non-science nerds can enjoy, On Iowa. The idea is that each incoming freshman is placed into a group of students with an older advising student. We did some work with our small group just talking about different aspects of college and having fun, then we all met up at Kinnick Stadium. The first thing I saw in the stadium was free food, (that is always a plus in my book).We learned the Iowa fight song and numerous other ways to show our Hawkeye spirit.  A video was shown about a great man whose name is almost synonymous with Hawkeye football, Nile Kinnick. Then there was a sweet fireworks show to end the night. I thought it was a pretty cool program, obviously since it was its first year it had its flaws, but I still thought it went fairly smoothly. All in all a great week, not to even mention all the cool people I have met along the way. Now it is time to buckle down for classes.

P.S. This is the nerd in me talking, but did you know there are Iowa Quidditch shirts? Needless to say one of my favorite garments lately.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 7:47 am and is filed under Campus Life, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.