New challenges at UCL

In October I became a member of the UCL Caledonian Society. For those of you who are not familiar with the term Caledonian, it comes from the Roman name for the area of modern Scotland. The society brings together people who are interested in Scottish culture, dancing and music. We meet fortnightly in order to reel. Reeling is a type of Scottish country dancing which dates back to the 17th century. My first encounter with reeling was during my time at Downe House, an independent secondary school, where reeling accompanied majority of social events with neighbouring schools. Students would be reeling before dinner in order to break the ice. There are around 10 most popular reels including the Hamilton Reel or the Reel of the 51st, and each one of them has different figures and rules. Thanks to the society I managed to get into the Reeling community of London, which organises big reels with about 150 people of all ages and lots of kilts. First of all the dance is demonstrated by a more capable group and then everyone starts dancing. It is indeed an incredible experience. In 2nd term, UCL Caledonian Society was looking for new people to the committee. I applied and joined the team as a Social Secretary, who organises society’s events. At the moment we are arranging the highlight of the reeling season- Caledonian ball. By this I would like to everyone who would like to try something new to come and dance with us.

The other memorable -rather academic- moment of this year is the molecular exploration week from a subject “Cell signalling”. This project consisted of several laboratory practicals on the topic of signalling in C. elegans when we had the unique opportunity to study animal’s signalling pathways. Each group was handed out one part of the signalling cascade MAPK/Erc and the goal was to write a complex and concise document about everything there is to know about it. My group had IMP (impedes mitogenic signal propagation), which has not been yet studied extensively. Due to its novelty we could focus on different hypothesis and managed to cover majority of papers about this enzyme. We all enjoyed this challenging task. Our biggest success was that we found out that there is research going on about IMP, however, some of the workplaces did not notice that the enzyme is described in literature under a different name. We decided to contact some of the companies and let them know about the extent of the research. All of them replied, thanked us for help and updated the info on their websites. This meant a lot to us, because although we were second year students and out of labs we positively affected the future of IMP’s research.

The new school year has brought us many challenges and proved once again why UCL is not only a school, it is a lifestyle.