Do I really know what coding is? What is a research article?

Module 2 was a real whirlwind for me and I struggled with R in the most basic ways and making a structure for my research article.

It was confusing at first when I didn't know how they all fit in a puzzle and how they had any relation to what we were doing. Listening to Professor Fraenkel made me realize that I should have paid more attention in my high school statistics class and 6.00. R was unfamiliar because of the amounts of packages we had to use and it didn't have the rigid structure that Python did, so I struggled a lot to even do the basics, such as running my code or downloading packages. Little did I know the hard part was yet to come.

The research article was a lot more overwhelming because of the amount of big data that we generated. Putting it together in a logical flow or even truly understanding the diagrams versus the general gist took a lot more time than I anticipated. With a lot of hours spent in office hours, I slowly pieced together how all the puzzle pieces fit into the story and found a logical (TBD by 109 staff) order to my paper that made sense in my thought process. Only to realize our data was statistically insignificant.... Once again the horrors of module 1 and statistical insignificance came back to make life difficult.


After figuring out the order, it was the task of writing coherent sentences that clearly displayed out our background information, methods, results, and general significance. I didn't realize that my grammar was so bad and my convenient cold and headache made sentences harder to formulate. Please forgive my lack of English skills...


All in all this project enlightened me to the complexities of writing a research article and the importance of choosing relevant data to display in an article. Hopefully, when I try to write another research article (if I ever...) this learning experience will help alleviate the struggles that were faced in this project.

-Cathy



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