Attack of the Sciences

This week was great, if one discounted all the projects that are being piled on us.

On Tuesday, we had Bio RA CCT, which was rather tough. Firstly, the questions that came out were quite different from what we were studying, or at least, they were about areas we studied least. The way the questions were presented was also... For example, we were asked to identify part of a carbohydrate (there were different diagrams) and I completely freaked out cause it was tough orientating all the diagrams correctly =(

Then, there was another question in which we needed to draw a lineweaver-burk plot which we had learnt about (at least it was mentioned in one of the worksheets) but had never actually drawn. Moreover, its complicated, since we had to plot 1/v against 1/S and find Km and Vmax using intercepts, which were also recipocals. So I was spending time figuring out how to draw the lines exactly, since it was hard to make sense of something when everything is recipocal.

Hopefully I drew that graph right though. The signs are encouraging since I did indeed get a straight line for all the plots (no inhibitor, inhibitor a and inhibitor b) and i got typical competitive and non-competitive inhibitor graphs =) I think I screwed up the table we were supposed to fill in though, especially since i cleverly assumed that calculators were not needed for biochemistry.

Luckily, the teacher was nice and gave us an extra ten minutes.

In the afternoon, we had a selection test for National Science Competition and International Junior Science Olympiad. 16 people, 13 sec 3s and 3 sec 2s, took it. The bio paper was easy, but the same cannot be said for the chemistry and physics paper. It so happened that the chemistry paper was open book though, and as we were not informed (only chem ra people were), we could borrow the textbook from those chem pros. It really helped and I answered almost all the questions thanks to it. I skipped the last 2 questions of the physics paper (8/30 marks)...

On Friday, we were informed of the results, and surprisingly, I got into the NSC team (comprising of 5 people) and Im also being considered for the IJSO recommendation (10 people, of which 6 in RI will be sent for moe selection test, and 6 people in Singapore sent for the actual olympiad). Really happy! Must mug for the competitions.

Finally, there was this really hilarious incident last Monday. We were having a CLE class on Public Display of Affection, and the teacher showed us this survey, of which one of the question was something like "Do you think its ok to make out ......" So Mark Brian Foo innocently asked his desk partner Stephen (who happened to be really depressed with his math ra mark =( ) what "make out" meant. Before the teacher could answer this extremely delicate question, Stephen said loudly, "IT MEANS TO HAVE SEX LAH!" The whole class including the teacher were rather amused...

Got to do CL project now... Math TA tmr too...

-signed-