My name is Bria VarnBuhler and I'm a senior Chemistry major
at Pomona College and am also on the soccer team
and I'm hoping this video will show you what a day in the life
of a student athlete at Pomona looks like.
It's 6am and I'm headed to the locker room to get ready for practice
This is the third day we've done practice this early and we have
quite a few more coming up in the pre-season.
Generally we'll go to practice this early, go and get breakfast
together as a team and then have some meetings
in the middle of the day go to lunch as a team
and have another training in the afternoon and evening
when it cools off a little bit.
(BRIA) Are you excited for 6am practice?
(Teammate) Oh I have never wanted to do something more.
(Bria)Are you excited for 6am practice?!
(Teammate)Yeah, so excited.
(Bria) Hey Isabel, what time is our practice this morning?
(Isabel)Way too...
So, we're walking down to practice now...I can't do it.
We're so good at this.
Except for before we...
Restart, re-....
We're on our way down to practice now, but first we have a tactical team meeting
so we're going to learn about our style of play and our formation
but yeah, this is the team.
Chirp on three. One, two, three. CHIRP!
(Bria)This thing our team does during pre-season is we do sessions
at the Hive which is a 5C creative space on campus
and we talk about our team values and team culture
team dynamics, so...
(Friend)Yeah, we had a really good session, we came up with five keywords
to describe our team, we're not gonna tell you them cause
cause those are private.
(Friend) Oh, it's recording now.
So I'm in the lab now, working on my SURP
it's a Chemistry SURP so my days are spent
from nine to five working in the lab on my project
(Friend) What do you know about aptamers?
(Bria) Oh, that's a good question.
So our project is about aptamers, which is a word
that we had no what it meant at the beginning of this summer
but basically it is, if you know what an antibody is
it's kind of a nucleic acid, so a DNA version of an antibody
so it's something we make, in vitro through some evolutionary
selection process that can specifically bind on whatever we
want it to bind on to. So the downstream applications
of that are things like medical diagnosis, so our aptamer
can bind a target molecule and give off some signal,
probably fluorescence in our case, that will let the medical
professional know the amount of that target molecule in a solution.
So, if we get there, that will be awesome, but
(Friend) We finished our first round yesterday of SELEX.
(Bria) Yeah, it's very slow so far, but it's all part of the learning process.
(Friend) Oh my gosh, it's our advisor, Professor Taylor
(Bria) These are our new shirts we got for working in Professor Taylor's lab. Go Taylor's lab!
So, now I'm on my way to my second class of the day
which is physical chemistry and it's my last chemistry class
that I have to take before finishing my major
I don't know what else to say.
(Bria) Ahh, the good ol' chem lounge. (Friend) Ohh, some students.
Alright, alright, we're going into chemistry commons, student lounge.
Today's a fun day because we're making a barbecue for the rest
of the chem department. There's my professor, Professor Taylor
cooking up some stuff at the stove. This is great, this is going well.
Thanks for tagging along with me, I hope you enjoyed
getting a look at a life of a Pomona student athlete, bye.