Course 20 Best 20

Coming into this semester, I had only taken one Course 20 (thermodynamics) prior and was still unsure whether this was the right major for me. Biology was my forte in high school, and I love the idea of problem solving in engineering – naturally, I turned to biological engineering as the answer. However, what I didn’t know after I officially declared my major was that Course 20 included a wide variety of topics. What initially popped into my head was more biomedical engineering, including medical devices.


This semester, I received a taste of the huge possibilities within biological engineering thorugh 20.109. I loved how the class was structured with three different modules concentrating on very disparate topics: from protein-ligand binding to gene expression to building batteries from phages. It fascinated me to learn about each module because I felt like it was another taste of biological engineering. Using small-molecular microarrays served as a high throughput method to search for ligands that bind to certain proteins, and this was a version of biological engineering because it incorporated the high throughput capabilities that many problem solvers apply. In addition, measuring gene expression through computational R code blew my mind up. It was absolutely humbling how powerful the GO analysis and other computational methods were. Finally, this past module has been so fun. I really enjoyed learning about phages and their inherent properties. Little did I know that making batteries from phages was let alone a possibility, and the creativity behind applying biological materials towards a battery kept me on the edge of my seat at every lecture. Being a biological engineer has changed in meaning to me. It is no longer a set career path, yet it is a constant state of being. A biological engineer is someone who synthesizes technology and biological substances to target a biological problem. I am confident that Course 20 is the best major for me, and I cannot wait for the next couple years as a budding biological engineer.

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