Tips for meeting with a BE Communication Fellow



Your first meeting with the Comms Lab can be a bit confusing. You know you need help with your 20.109 homework, but you don’t know what they’ll be able to help you with. 

Before you even schedule the meeting, it helps to find out a bit more about the available fellows. In my case, I found a BE fellow who was a TA for 20.109 in the past. This meant I didn’t have to explain as much about the assignment (it was a Methods section), and that she had a rough sense of the requirements/expectations of the assignment. At the end of the meeting we also had some time left over, so it was easy for me to bring up other assignments that were due soon, and for her to critique what I had so far.

The second tip is to make sure to give your Fellow an overview of the assignment. Sometimes they’ve taken or TA’d 20.109, but other times they may not have much experience with the class. It helps to send them a link to the assignment’s rubric or requirements when you set up the meeting through the Comms Lab website. Even if they’ve had previous experience with 20.109, there may be things that are different between then and now, so it’s always a good idea to tell them about the module and what you believe is expected for the assignment.

The third (and probably most important) tip is to ask questions! This sounds simple enough, but I often find that people are hesitant to ask questions because they’re concerned that they should already know the answer to it, or they don’t want to bother the person they’re asking with something they might think is trivial. The class is a learning experience and it’s expected that you’ll have questions, so it’s okay to ask for clarifications even if they’re minor. If certain questions are asked often enough, it also lets the Fellow know that something might be unclear in the assignment’s rubric/guidelines, which they could relay to 20.109 staff.

For example, it’s okay to explicitly ask your Fellow what they’ll be able to help you with, or how much they know about 20.109, or how these meetings typically go. In my case, she knew about the assignment, but didn’t know about the module details or the specific protocols. So I opened up a link to the protocol on the website, we went through a few parts that I was having trouble writing up, and she gave me some suggestions about how to address them. Even if they don’t know much about the specifics of what’s expected, they can still help you with your general style/structure of your writing.

It’s also okay if it’s still early in the stages of the assignment. For another assignment I was working on, I basically just had a list of bullet points of things I wanted to go over/discuss. My Fellow helped me flesh out a few of the points I was iffy about, and also helped to organize how those points would be discussed. So you can get still get help from the Comms Lab even if you don’t have anything concrete yet.





- Sachin Shinde





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Seeing the finish line!

The research proposal assignment start out as fairly intimidating.  Since 20.109 is my first introduction to biological engineering, I've appreciated being told exactly what to do.  To be tasked with crafting a research project that solves a biological problem, is original, and creative sounded like a lofty goal.  However, the more papers I read, the more I realized the real challenge was not having to come up with one idea, is was having too many ideas/options.  Even after Masrur and I had decided upon a pathway to target, there are so many diseases that the pathway is involved in that we then had to choose the most compelling disease to focus on.  Since we spent so much time deciding upon what exactly we were studying, we left little time for ourselves to define the research aim and detail the methods.  Overall, though, the project was really interesting and engaging.  I even found myself disappointed that the proposal wasn't real and that I wouldn't...
Read more

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