20.109 Data Summary: Far from Home


I’m glad that my lab partner and I thought about the report as we were doing experiments and doing the first few homework assignments. Having all the data analyzed right after we collected it was a good move, because now, to write the report, all we have to do is play around with the order of the figures and how we want to frame the story the data tells.

It was still really stressful though, because I had planned a trip to New Hampshire for 20 people on my floor over the weekend, the logistics of which kept me pretty busy for the days prior to the deadline. There was also an impending 320 exam that Thursday, so trying to balance spending enough time on everything was a challenge. Thankfully, the trip went well, and the data summary got turned in on time. Whether I spent enough time on 320 is yet to be determined (fingers crossed, though). Here’s a photo from New Hampshire!
 

One thing I can improve on though, is keeping track of references as I add them to the text. I spent a lot of time trying to chase down references from my web history, which was tedious and took way longer than it should have. I'll try to do that for the next assignment!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Warning: sentimental post ahead

It’s official - we survived the research proposals ( & I even managed to breathe this time)! To be fair I feel this assignment was really useful for getting practice in how to go about coming up with a research plan. We had to break down a mountain of a problem into a bite sized chunk and come up with a series of practically feasible experiments to tackle the real-world question. It was exciting to listen to everyone’s amazing proposals - I can only imagine what my 109 fam will go on to accomplish in their professional careers! I have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with them all, even when that entails commiserating at 1am in stud 5 about the massive amount of work we have left to do. Some academic environments can be cutthroat but my experience with others in 109 has been anything but. While some friendly rivalry exists between teams to produce the “prettiest” data, all in all it’s amazing how supportive everyone is. From memes and words of encouragement in the group chat, to h...
Read more

A satisfying conclusion to a sometimes exhausting semester

The research proposal process was a lot more work and (eventually) a lot more fun than I expected. Picking a topic was one of the hardest parts. At first, in brainstorming ideas and browsing papers, it seemed that any idea we could propose was either 1) trivial, 2) already done, or 3) unreasonable. I realized how much more difficult it is to come up with novel ideas than it is to read and understand the work that someone else has already done. It sometimes feels as if a field is either so saturated that everything has been tried already or so new that there's no clear direction to head. In thinking about the research proposal, I've come to realize how incremental and non-linear scientific progress often is. After we finally settled on an idea, I really enjoyed diving deeper into the literature. Only after exploring more what experiments have already been performed and models made did I appreciate better the questions that people have asked and are still trying to answer. It w...
Read more

Break it up into pieces

Just finished the Mod 2 Research Article! It was a really long assignment that took a while to complete, but I think I really started appreciating the homework we did along the way when I realized that we had basically already written the Introduction and Methods sections. I then started putting together the figures, and tried to split up the writing into small tasks (ie Results section for sequencing figure) to make it more manageable. Additionally, the teaching staff were very helpful and responsive to all my questions. After putting together a draft, I then read through it once myself and made edits to it, and scheduled an appointment with the CommLab for Monday morning. The grad student I met with this time was extremely helpful; he was able to pinpoint very clearly areas of my article that needed clarification, or were too wordy and needed to be cut down. Following his feedback, I revised my article again, and gave it a few more read throughs before submitting. I definitely think...
Read more