Homework Help

I ended up using all the resources available to write this article. They were extremely helpful; however, I found myself pulling out and consulting my homework assignments the most.
Don’t get me wrong; I pulled up the Comm Lab’s PowerPoint many times and followed their advice about starting with figures and ending with the title (I found it slightly humorous that the very last thing I wrote was the title). I also visited a Comm Lab fellow to get feedback on a figure and results section to use as a template for my other figures/results. It helped to get perspective from a person with a scientific background who hasn’t been looking at BRCA2-/- and DLD-1 cells and data for the past couple weeks.
I found the homework assignments most helpful for a couple reasons.

I could get direct feedback on my interpretations.
If I wasn’t understanding the data correctly or I was missing an important part in my analysis, I could quickly find out through homework. The feedback also gave hints for what I could be looking for when analyzing my data. It wasn’t a definite answer, but it was enough to point me in the right direction if I felt a little lost. Furthermore, I could figure out when I was just plain wrong.

I received good with the bad.
The feedback I received wasn’t only constructive criticism. Sometimes I would be lucky enough to strike the sweet spot with the methodology or the flow of introduction would sound just right. I would be rewarded with “This is great!”, which was extremely uplifting. It also helped to know what was a good example to base other portions of my lab report on.

Doing homework essentially means writing your research article.
Because most of our homework involved various parts of our research article, I actually used a lot of what I wrote in my homework. Of course, these sections were heavily modified to take the teaching staffs’ comments into account. Even with that said, I felt like I had the bulk of my research article done. I had the outline for my intro, most of my methodology, and a figure with its corresponding results and discussion. I could base the rest of my figures, results, and discussion off of this. The assignment felt slightly less daunting knowing that I could essentially copy and paste some of it into the final document, albeit with a slightly different “storyline”.

Now it’s done. It’s over. The biggest assignment of Module 2 is in the past.
And then there was one. Bring it on, Mod 3.



~ Nia Myrie

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Presentation

The presentation went well. I think it was super helpful to fake present to classmates and instructors. Getting feedback from people who didn't know very much about our topic was really important for overcoming the bias of information. That’s when you know more than your audience and because of this assume a certain level of literacy with your topic that your audience doesn’t necessarily have. We practiced a lot to different people and I think that paid off and turned a presentation that was initially inscrutable and complex to something that was logical and understandable. 
Read more

The Power of Statistics

Image
“Aaaaaah…..” “Oh, no!” (returning off the aspirator) “I’m sorry.” “What do we do?” (squeezing the aspirator tube) “Can we break the vacuum?” “Let’s pull together.” (pulling on the aspirator tube in two opposite directions unsuccessfully…) On the third day of Mod 1, my partner and I aspirated our +IPTG induced pellet. I was so convinced that we should aspirate the left over supernatant with an aspirator because it worked well for the –IPTG control pellet. Why did an n=1 experiment convince me that aspirating would be safe?  Consider a hypothetical situation where before any experimentation, I think there’s a 1/2 probability that the aspirator cannot aspirate a pellet, and 1/2 probability that aspirator can aspirate a pellet and does it half of the time. One successful aspiration should only increase the probability that the aspirator cannot aspirate a pellet to P conditional = 0.5/(0.5+0.25) = 2/3. So a successful aspiration should increase my confidence in aspira...
Read more

Mod 3 experience

I was initially worried after reading the introduction of Mod 3. I didn't necessarily understand what was going on at first and I did not want to work with batteries as I thought this was not what I signed up for. However, as time went on and we continued to learn what was going on, this was a really fun module. I genuinely enjoyed working on the lab, seeing the TEM results, and constructing our batteries. To think we can use our skills as biological engineers to make batteries is quite interesting. Also, the fact that the paper is roughly 3 papers makes it so much easier to do. Our presentations were also really interesting and I really like all of the ideas that I've heard from my peers. It really taught me that we're not that far away from writing our own papers in the future and coming up with ideas for research projects. Overall, 20.109 has equipped me with the essentials to be a biological engineer but most importantly, how to communicate with others in our field.
Read more