Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Highlights from Exploring LA

    All of the times I’ve been to LA in the past, I’ve left the airport for somewhere else and hardly looked back. Since we moved here we’ve been meaning to go over there and explore a bit, but it took Kyle coming to visit us from Maryland to make that happen. We managed to hit a lot…

  • Pumpkin Carving Party

    We had a bunch of people over to carve pumpkins on Hallowe’en weekend. It was a first experience for many of our friends and the results were quite impressive. One of the pumpkins turned out to look oddly similar to one of our Biochem professor’s trademark expressions. There’s also a toothy face, a devouring face,…

  • Trick or Treat? [Updated]

    Hallowe’en is fast approaching, and once again I am caught without a costume. I was thinking of hunting down a few accessories at a thrift store so I could be Hipster Hitler, but I’m not sure how well that would go over with folks not privy to the comic. There’s also the possibility of making…

  • Mouth-Watering Barbecue

    A bunch of us in my class wanted to have a post-test celebration, but since the exam was on a Monday we had school and lab obligations all week. Thus, our Post-Test Party was a kind of extended lunch at the creatively-named “Korea House,” a Korean barbecue forty minutes away from Loma Linda. I’d never…

  • First Test Down

    My grad school class had its first test yesterday. I’d say that it went pretty well, and not just because the multiple-choice section was accidentally made from the answer key. The essay questions will likely carry a lot more weight now, but I’m as cautiously optimistic as I can be after a test I spent…

  • Round and Round We Go

    Studying has more or less pushed me underground for the past week—we’ve got our first biochem test tomorrow. A side effect is that I’ve been unwittingly collecting pictures of metabolic cycles drawn (and redrawn) on various whiteboards. It started innocuously enough with me simply intending to “look at it later,” but instead of doing that…

  • Why Two Degrees?

    Looking over the long road ahead of me, one might consider asking, incredulously, why somebody would want to do an MD/PhD program at all. It’s certainly a justified question, to which the short answer is that I think receiving training in both clinical medicine and research science will be especially valuable in my future career.…

  • How I’m Spending the Next Decade

    I am still somewhat dumbfounded and incredibly grateful that I got into the MD/PhD program at Loma Linda University. Now that classes have actually started, I’ve noticed the people around me becoming increasingly confused about what MD/PhD actually means in terms of my daily activities. Indeed, the overall plan for how I’ll be spending the…