Forums » Smalltalk » AMA: A highschool biotechnology and chem major

Hello! My name is classy!
I am 17 and in highschool, I major in biotechnology and chemistry, and am in the process of writing a research paper on the ability of green tea to prevent or cause DNA damage.

I am a massive nerd, I love talking about TTRPG systems as ive been a player since i was 8 and ive been a DM for a few years now. along with that i love nuclear chemistry and almost anything relating to that topic.
big, massive, nerd.

I am very open to talk about my work in school and how my life is in general. I also live in Israel! So if you have any questions about the culture there I would be glad to answer to the best if my ability. Do note that i will not respond to any question that might involve politics as per the events rules and my own mental well being. Hope I could answer your questions!

I'm used to high school still being general education, so could you talk about how your high school seems to have a stronger career focus where you can pick something to major in, like going to college? And can you share more about how you're doing your research?

Gladly! The way my school handles education is that instead of picking individual classes besides the required ones. Each student chooses a course which he will participate for the next 3 years.

My school offers various course plans and I was accepted into the biotechnology course, that means that along with my regular studies such as math, English, hebrew, history ect. I learn an extra amount of hours per week which correlate to my course or "major". This includes (as of this year) 6 hours of chemistry/biology lessons, 4 hours of written biotechnology classes per week in which we go over the material itself. And 5 hours of practical biotechnology in which we work on our research papers and learn topics more focused on our research, along with labs which we conduct experiments but I will talk about that in a bit.

The topics we learn about are obviously not as general as "general education" goes but at least in the written portion we will learn more generic methods of conduction biotechnology procedures and such.

Chemistry is very simple and each year gets more and more complicated. We learn various topics to certain lengths. Tho not at the college level, I teach myself at the college level because I am... A nerd...

And for practical biotech classes. We usually work on our research paper by pulling information from other research papers. We will go to the Belmonte research center located in Jerusalem for our experiments to actually collect raw data about the topic we chose to explore, which is "the effects of green tea on DNA damage". My teams theory is that it can prevent DNA damage.

This will be done by first synthesizing proper DNA plasmids to check for genotoxic damage. Implementing them inside bacteria cells. And checking to see if or how much the gene expresses in an environment when compared to a control environment, its all really cool!