The hardest part of writing is getting started.


It's exciting to be almost complete with Mod 1 (just the mini-presentation left!). I enjoyed the module and learned a lot about DNA damage and repair, experimental science, and scientific communication. Before starting 20.109, I thought the main goal would be to learn a bunch of specific wet-lab techniques that I could use in doing research. Now, however, I realize that one of the most valuable parts of 20.109 is learning to synthesize results from different experiments into a coherent narrative and to communicate that narrative effectively to others. These are skills that will be essential in any work that I do in the future.

For me, the most challenging part of any writing assignment is getting started. I appreciated the daily assignments in 20.109 that forced me to start different portions of the data summary earlier, even before we had complete data. Completing these assignments made the task of completing a data summary more of a concrete problem and less of a vague and scary task. My favorite part was making figures, because it helped me break down our work into individual experiments and consider what the result of each experiment could mean, before synthesizing all the results. The portion that was hardest for me to complete was connecting our work back to the big problems of public health and cancer. These problems felt so enormous and our experiments seemed so small that I sometimes struggled to show how we were making advancements without overstating the implications of our experiments. However, this is how science is done—one small step of the time, slowly chipping away at small pieces of a problem that seem especially relevant or tractable, as a more and more complete image emerges gradually over time.









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