Hot Mod 3

My best friend and I used to live together, and because of that, we would share how each of our days went before bed each night. Freshman year, this was easy and often short because we had most of the same classes, were both on the softball team, had the same friend group. It was more of a discussion on our feelings about the different feelings and thoughts we'd had on experiences we'd shared that day.

Sophomore year, we split into our majors. We no longer had classes together, but that only gave us more to talk about each night. She would tell me about controls and other mechanical engineering things I can't accurately describe. I would talk about thermodynamics, and neuroscience.

One thing that bothered me about all of this was that I always show the most genuine interest in the things she learns and how excited she is about her science, but I never felt like I had the same response from her. It was almost as if biological engineering was barely engineering in her eyes, and that her science was cooler than my science. I know she didn't mean to seem this way, and maybe I could have spoken in a way that was more intriguing, but I mostly just felt patronized, as if what I was learning wasn't as cool or important.

This is of course nothing against her. I've talked to her about this and we still talk about our work with one another whenever we hang out, because these things are exciting to us and seeing the other person excited makes us happy.

We had dinner together just last week and talked a bit about the projects we had going on in our respective CI-M classes. She told me about her poster presentation about determining the perfect softball bunt mechanics. I told her about our phage-scaffolded cathodes. Suddenly, when she realized biology could be used to build a mechanical object, something physical and tangible, she showed the genuine interest in what I was saying that I'd been hoping to see for two years.

I think it is pretty powerful that biological engineering is literally the practice of making cool stuff out of biology. This module was particularly interesting because of its tangibility and how easy it was to show people who aren't normally interested in biology just how great of a tool it is.

Professor Belcher's excitement about this module resonated the entire way through and shone in our own excitement in communicating our science through the Mini-Report and how we talk about what we did with people not in 20.109. It went by way too quickly, but this was definitely the most fun module. I feel like it opened my eyes to a new world of biological applications I hadn't previously even known existed nor would have every thought of.