For the second time in as many weeks, I struggle to find MSB 1.05. This is getting embarrassing. At least I’m only ten minutes late this time.
Luckily for me, BIOMO202 Genetics is not my class, so the missed notes aren’t an issue, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m in the wrong degree… because this is interesting. This lecture is all about how genetics can interact with the administration and absorption of certain drugs in our brains and our bodies, and that fascinates me to no end; too bad I’m also busy listening to the most boring history documentary of all time, that won’t answer any of the questions I have in my essay. Great.
Quick shoutout to the lecturer though; it would be amazing if she could run some of my courses. The lecture was over by 9:42, and given we were still on the first slide when I walked in, I’m going to say that it couldn’t have taken any longer than 37 minutes. My genius STEM student friend tells me her record is 31 minutes, potentially the most impressive thing I learned today.
So what does she actually teach? I have no idea (once again proving that I’m an arts student), but I’ll try to make sense of the few things I heard and saw on the board… oh no. Turns out, there’s a downside to lightning fast lecturers; we’re already on the fifth slide. Time to piece together the small fragments of intelligible English I can hear.
First of all, it’s a genetics class, and she mentioned something about AI and alleles, those things that dictate our physical features. Looks like my future job isn’t the only one at risk of an AI takeover. Then there’s a strange and vaguely inappropriate looking graphic of serotonin and what must have been a neuron block, unless the giant red arrow is pointing in the wrong direction. The serotonin can’t get through to the neuron, which is something I think we can all relate to. Given that blocked or low serotonin is what I thought caused depression (a quick google search tells me that my thinking is outdated boomer talk), it’s good to know that genetics are, in fact, a factor.
And now there’s more super smart Sciencey stuff going on up on the board that I can’t translate. No, seriously, it looks like it’s written in code; numbers and letters and symbols I can’t follow are thrown up like sketchy ads on a pirating website (A240-GCD*&Blah wants to know my location), and my friend’s best efforts still aren’t enough for me to make any sense of the garbled characters highlighted in an assortment of colours that a rainbow would be jealous of.
All in all, this class looks like it’s fairly interesting, and it has incredibly efficient lecture time. I just hope that everybody attending is able to understand what’s being said, and that nobody stops listening for longer than half a second, lest they miss some crucial detail for their exam that won’t ever be mentioned again, until said exam, like I did. My friends start talking about everything they’ve learned, and I have to smile and nod along because the only words I recognise were “Drug”, “Administer” and “The”. Scratch what I said earlier about being in the wrong degree; boring history documentaries with a German narrator about some joe blogs from the 1500s is exactly what I should be doing after all.
