R Ruined My Life and I'm Not Being Melodramatic




Writing the research article was so hard haha. For multiple reasons. First of all, I realized I didn’t really understand our motivation or goal for the module. Don’t even get me started on the R analysis… I didn’t understand TCGA or what our qPCR data was supposed to prove. More than that, literally none of the data we got was what we expected. We somehow discovered a way to preferentially kill DLD-1 cells with incredible efficiency while leaving BRCA2-/- cells relatively untouched, which was literally the opposite of what we wanted.

Like reading a dense scientific paper, though, after a few passes looking at all the data, it started to make sense. The hardest part for me was that writing the paper felt backwards. Instead of thinking of questions and coming up with experiments to figure out the answers, I spent a lot of time trying to turn the data we had into the answers to questions that we hadn’t asked. Wrapping my head around it was tough. Shout out to Josephine for handling all my midkey aggressive questions about what the heck was going on with everything.

I’m actually pretty excited about my paper now, though; I almost want to do research about the differences between the isogenic cell lines. Almost… I think if I had to do this all over again, I would make sure to come up with some big questions to answer and keep those in mind as I work through the module so I’m constantly considering how all the data fits into a narrative instead of trying to cram it all into some story at the end.

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