Truly a Learning Experience


20.109 has really been a new experience.  I thought I had come to the class with a head start, having had wet lab experience in my UROP in the past, but I was in for a rude awakening! Chemical synthesis is not at all like working with actual cells.  Pipetting was about the only thing I really knew how to do, but the rest was learned on the spot.  I was EVEN MORE disillusioned to find that nearly everyone else had biological lab experience and a frame of reference from which they could draw.  I know now that the time in 20.109 lab has been fairly new and difficult for almost all of us – which provides at least a little bit of comfort! 

            Aside from the actual lab procedures part, I’ve found the material to be super interesting.  This class really makes me feel as though I’ve landed in the right major for me, which is a nice feeling.  The technologies that we’ve learned, like SMM, are really innovative and seem to have a fairly profound impact on biological research today.  So, I’ve felt quite special to have the opportunity to understand them and deal with the data they yield.  It’s also always a cool and convenient thing when the material in two of your classes (the other class being 7.05) align.  AND even cooler when you are able to actual implement and test what you’ve learned in real time, in a real lab. 

            Now for the report.  I actually really appreciated the clarity that writing the report provided.  To me, each day in lab seemed a bit to be its own little experiment and I struggled to connect conceptually what we had done to the day before and to the day after - in other words, the big picture.  The Mod 1 report allowed us to zoom out and really look at the progression and meaning of all that we had accomplished.  It was also really nice to produce pretty and colorful figures.  I wasn’t quite so disappointed that the data itself was not as anticipated, since (1) we spent relatively little time actually deciding upon our ligands and were initially already unsure of how they would perform and (2) it was just really cool to see that we were able to actually quantify and study things, despite the results.

            All in all, I’m left wanting to know more.  I wish that we had the time, resources, and space in the curriculum to repeat or expand the experiment and derive more real, meaningful results.

Excited for Mod 2 (and all its challenges)!

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