2nd Semester in CBCMP: Circles and Clubs

I haven't updated this blog in a while lol... A lot of stuff happened in the 2nd semester honestly. Firstly I joined circles. For those of you who don't know what a circle is, it basically is a club which is not demanding. The definition of club or 部活 here in Japan is basically student groups that are more official and demands your time, for example if you join some sports circle, you gotta practice several times a week and attend all their activities.

So basically in this 2nd semester I joined 2 circles. I'm not really into sports activities so I was just trying to join something that will possibly give me something in the future such as achievements and experience this and that.

Gonna talk about the one I first joined: biomod. It is not really a circle to be honest, more like a relaxed class (going to get credits for this circle lol).

What is this circle about anyway? To summarize, what we do is we are trying to create molecular machines or structures using DNA and join the international competition held in UCSF (previously Harvard), and is organized by Wyss institute of Harvard. We meet about once a week, depends on the members empty slot, this semester it was decided to be every Friday from around 5pm in Suita campus (gotta rush and ride the 4.20 blaze it bus from Toyonaka campus).

The 国内大会 or the national competition was usually held in Tokyo but this year it was decided to be held in our university, Osaka university (yay! no need to buy tickets to Tokyo). Rather than competition, it is more like a practice to prepare teams before the real competition. Looking at the previous years' abstracts, seemed like most teams haven't even started the experiments hahaha.

For this competition, we have to do planning of the DNA structure (of course), do the experiments and observe our results, then we have to present our results through presentation and a website (wiki page) and also a promotional video. A rigorous job knowing our team consists of 6 1st years who know nothing about web design and video making. In addition to that, we had to apply here and there for research grants, which was a pain in the ass but we ended up with around 900k yen in research fund, so not bad I guess?

Anyway we held on, we have decided on the structure and 90% finished the design. Then we just have to work on the video and wiki page to try and secure a better place than last year's team who won bronze project award.

Here goes team Handai:

優勝を目指そう #biomod2017
A post shared by Johannes Nicolaus (@otjin) on Jul 8, 2017 at 4:41pm PDT

Anddd..... the other club I joined is tamakomi, basically an 英会話 or English speaking club, not particularly active but I do enjoy going there from time to time. Basically joined bcs the other guy in Biomod is there so why not right? Maybe find someone cute am I right? hahahahaha. Also, surprisingly, some Japanese actually speak really good English. We have meetings every Thursday from 6-8 pm and after that is dinner so people who wanna go can decide if they wanna go and eat out or not.

So that's basically my 2nd semester club activities. If you feel like joining our just have any questions about any of these (actually about anything), just hit me up and I'll tell you more about it!

more on biomod:
http://biomod.net/
http://www.molecular-robotics.org/tag/biomod/ (in Japanese)

more on tamakomi:
https://tamakomi.jimdo.com/

2023 2
2022 2
2021 1
2020 1
2019 2
2017 5
2016 5

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