"Pinches of magic dust" that were negative

Having worked in a UROP for the past year, I have grown extremely accustomed to failing. My ELISAs wouldn't develop color, my cells died, or straight up doing lab math wrong. When I came into 20.109, I thought maybe it would be a bit better since I had already failed in the many ways possible. Oh how wrong I was.

Even when we were checking with Josephine every other step on the wiki and confirming lab math with every teaching staff, our results still didn't make sense. Our SDS PAGE had beautiful smears that didn't show the band at 17 kDa. The PPIase assay showed significant changes in specific activity, but they were negative. How does that even happen? The DSF data for one of our ligands did not show a temperature shift at all. In short, a lot of things did not make sense.

As we started to analyze data, we continuously got our math wrong and was on a rollercoaster of being happy that our data was statistically significant and then upset that it wasn't. We realized the importance of always checking your lab math. Knowing what numbers stand for and how it factors into calculations really helps you accurately and QUICKLY analyze data. 20.109 made me really learn the science behind everything instead of just doing as I was told in my UROP. Long gone were the days where I could push the responsibility of lab math to someone else.



The data summary assignment really helped me understand the "telling a story" concept that was always being thrown around. When I read the assigned article for class, it was easier to decipher and follow the story that they were telling, because we had told one of our own. It was interesting to see how our story came together-ish and learn the rationale for our experiments in the process.

-Cathy Nguyen

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