As soon as the Fall 2026 semester began, I was basically thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire by my Microbiology lab professor. A sweet yet very quiet woman with a thick Indian accent. Since everyone in the lab was desperate to be there, I did not get first dibs on a seat up front. So, I found (and still find) myself sitting towards the very back of the lab room, straining my ears to hear my professor's instructions.

Personally, I was expecting the first day of lab to simply be a lecture introduction to the class. Instead, right away we were told to take out our professional-style lab notebooks, don some rubber gloves, and start fucking around with E. coli.

Ok, it wasn’t that sudden. We were given about 10 minutes to refamiliarize ourselves with the micropipettes using water before we were asked to jam those into some actual samples of E. coli. But once we showed the professor that we could successfully configure and use each of the different micropipettes, she gave each of us our own sample of E. coli to work with, along with the DNA we wanted to jam into the E. coli.