Overcoming Obstacles

This week in ISM, I have accomplished two major things: presenting my QuickTrip Presentation and rebooting the interview search process.

I decided to present last Monday, and I'm glad I did. Although Pirtle gave us a window that extended to the end of the week, I had numerous tests & other major grades which I did not want to conflict with. For the presentation, Mr. Pirtle wanted us to present an interesting topic in the frame of a journey, and we were given much leeway. I decided to take a traditional route, exploring attractions in a specific country, but present it in a creative manner. I settled to explore Brunei because I actually did some research on it in 8th grade. It really is a fascinating yet underrated country, and I wanted to show how cool it was to my classmates. The presentation I gave was in the form of an itinerary--with dates, times, flights, and codes. I tried projecting my enthusiasm over the Zoom call, and I think it worked out really well--my classmates gave mostly positive feedback about my engagement. However, they did acknowledge some unnatural pauses embedded throughout my presentation. That is something I'll be working on.

More important than the QuickTrip, I was finally able to start the interview search process at full speed. Of course, I was not slacking or anything before--I was getting ahold of some contacts. The problem was I only able to use Gmail and LinkedIn... Why? Well, for the last two weeks, when I tried contacting clinics and geneticists through phone, the phone app I had really bugged out on me. I did not figure out that issue until a few days ago. Up till that point, I was thinking those contacts had faulty phone numbers. Now that I've figured that issue out & installed that phone app--I made a lot of progress especially on Thursday. I was able to get an interview with a genetic counselor and get some interest from a highly successful clinical geneticist. I have much to catch up on that I could've done in the lost time, but I am surely rebounding.

All in all, I think the next week is going to great. I have an interview to look forward to on Wednesday during school, and I'm continuing to absorb information about genetics through my research.