Hello dear reader!
My name is Kai, and I’m candidate number three in this year’s wonderful blogger ensemble.
First of all, let me volunteer a few factoids. I’m 21 years old (gosh), and currently knee-deep in the second year of my degree in Biochemistry. And while my spurious North American accent often leads people to think I’m Canadian, the weird looks I get when people see the æøå keys on my laptop is perhaps what most readily betrays that I am, in fact, Norwegian.
Fair warning, I have not blogged before. And so I expect this will be an interesting exercise in plaiting the tumbleweeds in my head into some semi-coherent prose for you to read. So bear with me.
If it’s one thing I’ve learned in my first year, it’s that Manchester’s a place whose essence is not easily captured. It’s so many things to different people. So maybe ‘diverse’ is the best descriptor? I’m still wrapping my head all the possibilities of what to make of myself here! In between studying and all the uni commitments, some of the things I’ve enjoyed in the past year include playing a bit of tennis, seeing Bonobo live, hitting some great house parties here and there and exploring the Northern Quarter.
London snapshot, yours truly on the right.
I’m otherwise engaged with ANSA, the association of Norwegian Students Abroad, where I’m a web editor. Earlier this month I was also part of planning a career day in London, which went swimmingly. Over one hundred attendees showed up, and lots of cool companies looking to recruit as well. Can never get started too early I suppose!
And of course, what would be the point of attending a corporate event without hoarding various promotional doodads? Especially when what’s on offer includes a wind-up Android robot from Google and this snazzy gold bar-shaped USB stick from the Bank of Norway. Surely it was a successful outing on that account alone.
Trinkets
As far as uni is concerned, now’s the time for getting started with second year dissertations. Among the eight topics we get to rank I was assigned my second last choice… but fear not, no tears were shed! In fact, it’s actually proving to be quite a trip down the rabbit hole. It’s about “the RNA world” hypothesis, which proposes that before life emerged, the Earth consisted of a primordial soup of chemicals, among them RNA (a cousin of DNA). Some of these RNAs are able to copy themselves and assemble into surprisingly complex network structures, all driven by fairly simple chemistry. Eventually you get something akin to lifelike behaviour emerging from what we would normally think of as these “dead” molecules, which might shed some light on how life on Earth arose, or how it might happen on other planets. Heady stuff!
The workload pressure has been steadily cranking up the past few weeks, with ethics essays, posters on bacteria, lab assessments and peer-peer reviews all soon impending. Regardless, this self-professed movie buff usually finds the time to drag some friends along to go to the cinema in between it all (did anyone say Interstellar? *mind blown gesture*).
I guess the weeks leading up to Christmas are now bound to be jam-packed on all fronts. So I say bring it on.
Yours until further notice,
Kai
Manchester Life Scientists 