Season Opener!
This week has been pretty eventful and it’s taken me a few days to get around to writing again. First of all Avery had its formal dinner of the term. Buuuuut…more excitingly, the men’s and women’s tennis teams had our first match!
Our match was played at Biola University. It’s not often that we get time or have the means to go too far off campus, so traveling to Biola, which is a 45 minute drive, was very refreshing. It was an absolutely gorgeous Californian morning and our matches went very well. As a team of eight players, we played 3 doubles matches and 6 singles matches. I played both a doubles match and a singles match. Each individual match win counts as a point to the total score. The team to get 5 or more points out of the 9 possible points wins the match. Our women’s team won by a score of 7 to 2! The men’s team lost by a narrow margin of 4 to 5. Updates about the match can be found here:https://www.gocaltech.com/sports/wten/2013-14/releases/201402019xangz
This weekend also saw another first: my first day in lab! On Sunday evening I went to work in lab for the very first time. I made my way to Spalding (one of the chemical engineering labs) in the light rain. The lab was inviting and bright green. My mentor, a grad student, had also been an undergrad here at Caltech. He showed me how to do DNA transformation and many other interesting things in lab. I had arrived at 6 pm and by the time we finished at 10, the pavement was glistening with rain under the faint glow of the lights.
Looking back on this weekend, it was pretty tough time-wise. It is hard to organize all my work around the extra activities that I’ve decided to take on but I feel that everything I choose to do only enhances my experience here. After all, there is no better place to try playing a sport and there is no better place to try doing research for the first time. Next week will be tough because midterms are this week. Couple that with tennis practice and lab time, it will definitely be exhausting, but I know it will be worth it.
