Adventures in Bio science

Yesterday I went to a garden expo at Rolling Ridges Nursery in Webster Groves. The Garden Expo had around 20 booths of landscape companies, gardeners, and volunteer opportunities. Organizations like Gateway Greening (group that creates bed gardens around the St. Louis area), Saint Louis Parks and Recreation sponsoring their Garden Program, STLCC Horticulture, and several landscaping companies. I wanted to go to this event because I’ve been interested in pursuing landscape architecture as a career and wanted to get some more background about plants and landscaping. One business at the expo that stood out to me was Wallflower Design. A landscape design company that designs residential yards and gardens. The company offers design and horticulture services to customers. It was cool to see their hand drawn landscape designs and learn more about their design process. Another cool booth there took honeysuckle branches and turned them into tables and other furniture. It was cool to see how thi...

Yesterday, I went to the Health Careers Fair at Washington University St. Louis. The event was only in the morning and consisted of a fair, panel, and lunch. During the fair there was booths set up around the gymnasium with different healthcare careers like pharmacy, pediatrics, nursing, physical therapy, audiology, and many more. I really enjoyed the pediatrics booth because they had a lot of hands on activities. I was able to look inside the ear and the eye, as well as give a baby mannequin chest compressions and oxygen. Besides getting to try different things the booth was super informative compared to the others. Following the fair was a discussion about gene editing. My favorite part of the discussion was the perspective of a scientist and an ethics professional. Gene editing creates a lot of controversy about whether it is ethical to alter these genes to create the “designer babies”. Hearing both perspectives gave me good insight to help develop my own opinion about the boundarie...

So far this week has been awesome because of no school on Monday because of MLK Jr Day as well as the snow we got this weekend. All of this time off has given me time to think about what I want to do for this semester. I am still waiting to hear back from the Botanical Gardens about volunteering but hoping that I can start volunteering there sometime within the next month. I think I will really enjoy working with plants and hoping this opportunity will help determine it working with plants would be a good career choice. Meanwhile, at Spark we have been doing a lot of different lab work. We learned how to to a dilution and a serial dilution. Both of them seemed very simple and practical in the lab. We practiced with a ¨stock¨ and then diluting it with water to make a new solution that has a different concentration. Understanding dilutions is very important for working in a lab because it is cheaper and efficient to use diluted solutions. I´m looking forward to doing the blood typing lab...