Mid-block Evaluations and Sharp Talk

In the morning, I worked on writing mid-block evaluations for my PBL group because they are due Monday already. I have to do eight of them total: one for each of my seven PBL group members, and then a self-evaluation. For some reason that I don't understand, we never seem to do mid-block evaluations of our tutors. But we will evaluate them at the end of the block if this block works the same way that the summer block did.

There was no school today, but I did head over to campus for a little while in the afternoon to go to the gym and see a talk. The talk was by Phillip Sharp, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on introns and splicing. He was telling us about small interfering RNAs. I thought that the first part of the talk, where he focused on therapeutic applications of siRNAs and the results of studies in primates, was the most interesting. I'm not really all that into molecular biology though, so when he started getting into the specifics of the mechanisms toward the end of the talk, some of it kind of lost me. But I think that it was a worthwhile talk to attend, and I saw several other CCLCM students there. Actually, the auditorium was completely full to the point where several people, including me, had to sit in the aisle. And there's one other thing that I'll warn you about going to talks here: people's beepers go off during the entire talk constantly. It's actually pretty annoying.