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 helping each other practice for presentations, we have developed a real sense of community. This class has provided the most positive collaboration experience I have had to date, and I am sad that we will no longer be meeting regularly, but I look forward to seeing everyone around the ‘tute.
❤

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

109 has... taken over

Image
SOoo... Journal Club presentations have finally ended and a time of "rest" has come. I'm not really sure how to make this a deep, enlightening post so I'm just going state what happened (in a clear and concise way) and hope that the meaning comes out on its own. Inconclusive Data on the Effect of Practice on Stress Reduction and Journal Club Presentation Time  Introduction Every biological engineer at MIT is required to take 20.109. Students are required to complete six major communication assignments, three of which are verbal assignments. It's of particular importance that one understand the process of developing a Journal Club presentation to prevent the pain and failure of future 109ers. Methods Journal Club Prepared Using Blood Sweat and Tears The paper "CRISPR-Cas9-based mutagenesis frequently provokes on-target mRNA misregulation" (WHATSTHIS) was analyzed using my brain to procure meaningful figures that would later be pre
Read more

Journal Club Reflection

At first, I was super concerned about the journal club assignment-- it was 15% of the course grade, and it was like ten minutes!!! What if I forgot everything, or if powerpoint deleted my slides the night before, or I completely misunderstood the paper? However, since I was worried, I decided to start really early. I read the paper during downtime in lab, and starting working on the slides as soon as I could. After about a week of tuning the slides and what I planned to say, I felt prepared. I asked a friend to function as an audience, and practiced twice, realizing that I needed to add more visual cues to the powerpoint-- it was really confusing on a busy slide what I was talking about. After this round of practice, I further refined my slides. I was able to fit another practice on Monday night with Fidelia and Athena, which really helped as well. In general, I never remember how presentations actually end up going because I get too focused on not talking too fast or clicking the wron
Read more

Hey! That actually wasn't half bad

Image
I had experienced numerous journal clubs and presented my own work in lab meetings in my urops before and so I thought I would feel more prepared for the 109 journal club. Between an unrelenting onslaught of assignments and the beginning of all morning practices for crew, I didn't get to prepare much of my presentation until somewhat last minute. I created slides to cover every experiment, result, and conclusion in the paper - certain that it would be over the 10 minute target, but uncomfortable with having to cut material. What was the most important? It didn't help that the article was not originally in English and the translation was not perfect. There were some sentences that seemed to directly contradict each other and one plot in particular that indicated significance where the text claimed there was none! After re-reading the article a number of times I ultimately narrowed down to the core claims and so was able to whittle down the presentation to just the essentials, bu
Read more