Undergraduate / Common App; The summer of a lifetime: 'the title flashed at me as I read the newspaper' [3]

The summer of a lifetime: the title flashed at me as I read the newspaper. My only thoughts were that there were no words to describe my 10-week research internship at the Jackson Laboratory. There, I conducted bioinformatics research analyzing the relationship between sleep and gene expression in a sleep-deficient mouse model. By the end of the summer, I determined the beginnings of a genetic network linking sleep and obesity, candidate gene regulators for sleep and potential gene knockout models. That summer, I put my heart into every script I wrote, every phenotype I studied and every error message I corrected. For as much work as I put in, I received back. My mentors were so impressed with my effort, results and progress in programming that they made special efforts for me to be one of the first students ever to return to the program. Now, as I look back, my 10 weeks there feels like 10 days. 10 days spent learning about programming, genetics, and mice-10 days of my dream job.

I was wondering if I could make the above bolded line a lot better.
original it was- My only thoughts were : there were no words to describe my 10-week research internship at the Jackson Laboratory.
But that's not really grammatically correct so..

Undergraduate / In all of my life, I had never ridden a bike; Roommate Letter [2]

so I waited to the last minute like an idiot and i really need someone to read over my essay. it's not my best but I think I'm going to have to make do with it cause I have little time left. please help me revise it.

You are about to write your future college roommate a letter. Please provide the roommate with a personal story that will give him/her some insight into your personality.

It took 7 days to pack for my summer internship at the Jackson Laboratory and only 1 to realize that I forgot my toothbrush. With my roommates, I planned a quest to the closest store for a new one. There was only one problem in this quest; it required the use of bicycles.

In all of my life, I had never ridden a bike. Still, I hooked on a helmet, sat on the contraption, warned everyone that I had never ridden, lifted my legs on the pedals and subsequently fell off. I stood back up, but not for long. That day, I fell multiple times, crashed into a few trees, cars, light poles, and even a few people. All 5 of my roommates eventually left me as I struggled to keep up. When I finally arrived at the local Rite Aid, I made sure I bought a state of the art toothbrush worth my 3 mile bike ride there and headed 3 miles back. I arrived at the house soar and aching all over. For a few weeks, I had a hard time sleeping, standing, sitting and generally moving around. Unfazed, I rode my bike every day to and from work. It was an uphill battle (literally the path to work was uphill), but I saw it as a fun, new challenge and loved it from there.

I'm always up for jumping into the unknown no matter the obstacle ahead of me. I like trying new and different things whether it's learning how to code or simply riding a bike. If you want to go on an adventure, I will always be there waiting to experience the fun that new challenges inevitably provide. Throughout my life, I have made a will to always try new and different activities because you never what you'll love. In my experience I've always loved the new things that I've tried whether it's competing in pie eating contests, hiking to waterfalls, camping, whitewater rafting and slack lining and I hope we can try new things to together.

If you're not into pie eating contests or hiking, I also like an array of other things like programming; my favorite languages are Perl, Bash and R but I also want to learn Ada and Java. I like solving math team problems that require thought and problem solving rather than just knowledge of formulas. I love science, research reading books, the sound of a laugh, making jokes and just talking. Most of all, I love living life to the fullest, seizing every day and night handed to me. In the next years, I want to take my mindset of carpe diem to Tech where I can delve into anything in arm's reach.

I want to try everything that Georgia Tech has to offer whether it's something academic like helping conduct a research experiment or community related like volunteering at their annual high school math team competition. I want to meet new people different from who I am, try foreign foods, join an intramural sport, learn a new language (coding and others), start a charity and study abroad. I want to live and learn from a community of people truly passionate and inspired by what they do and teach. Each day I hope to live my life (as best as any college student can) taking risks and fulfilling my academic and personal pursuits and dreams. I hope that you will be there to join me, taking advantage of the exciting road ahead of us at Georgia Tech.