Brooke works part-time at a campus restaurant — when she can fit it into her schedule.

Nov. 9, 2006
It’s another day in biology lab. Today is the second day I have had to be in Burruss at 8:00am to measure growth curves. Two days ago for Microbiology lab and then today for research. 8:00ams are torture, that’s why I don’t sign up for them, so why am I here???

It’s a gorgeous day outside though; maybe I’ll sneak out for a little while between my half hour readings of optical density for the growth curve.

The last two weeks have been stressful weeks for everyone, it feels like I have a mid-term or project due every other day. This week has been calmer, thankfully. I know its just the lull before the storm though, professors will cram in as much as they can before Thanksgiving Break. Which p.s. I am soooooo looking forward to. I need a little turkey and pumpkin pie in my life! :)

It seems whenever I have a break from school my other activities seem to pile up. My sorority’s initiation is this Saturday and I’ve been working all week on welcome baskets for my ‘little sisters’. I’ve also had to pick up a job to help pay for everything (yah, dining services <--- that was some sarcasm if you couldn’t pick up on it). I can’t complain too much they let me work when I can (which is almost never) and I don’t have to work weekends!!

Ok, back to work now! :(

Jan. 15, 2007
My favorite thing at JMU sitting on the stairs of Wilson. In the winter they're heated and in the spring you can look out onto the quad and see everyone hanging out, playing Frisbee, or doing work. That building is an icon of JMU and from it you can see what JMU is really about, a small community at a big school.

My dream come true would be to graduate from JMU and get accepted into a graduate program for either genetics or genetic counseling.

At the end of last semester I kind of hit a wall b/c with the 'primer walking' because I designed twenty primers and combined them randomly with the hope of getting some product. That didn't work, so we're taking a new approach. Dr. Beach spent much of the break reviewing the work that I had already done with Sequencher and modified it enough so that we are going to used the primers already designed in an ordered fashion to create products from PCR. We've discovered a lot of promising information in the Sequencher sequence about potential orders and locations of genes. This new approach to 'primer walking' will hopefully fill in the missing fragments that we've were attempting to fill last semester.

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