Defense

I feel euphoric as I write this. This morning the class had the project defense, and I'm so glad it's over. The feeling is equivalent to a postprandial state after a really good meal—only no calories were involved.

You get the point.

We worked on Influenza A(H1N1), and we thought our results were cool. Our major problem was talking all about the stuff we did for 7 minutes. What can you say in 7 minutes, right? But we had no choice. I was chosen as the presenting speaker, so I was pressured to keep it really short and sweet. And I'm talking of compressing 180 pages worth of information in that limited time frame. It wasn't an easy task. Somehow I had to leave some important details along the way.

But everything happened smoothly when it was our group's turn. We said what we had to say. And I'm thankful that many appreciated our efforts.

It humbles me to know that we started from nothing. Our experiments weren't working, so we made a back-up plan of sorts, just to have something to submit at the end of the academic year. Interestingly, we got cool results in all the other side studies we did—better, in fact, than our original project.

God is truly amazing.

Many thanks to Dr. Frank Heralde III for seeing us through and Kuya CJ Pastor for guiding us in the lab. It's almost over now. Can you believe it?