How hard could it BE?

When I told my UROP supervisor I was taking 20.109 this semester, she told me it'd be great because in lab classes they give you experiments that always work perfectly and give you nice data that’s easy to write about. I guess she really didn't know 20.109...

Initially, I thought that writing the data summary would be pretty straightforward. I thought my partner and I could just sit down for a few hours and go through our data, write some conclusions, and be done. We'd already put so much time into the experiments, and we've had to draft a lot of parts of it already as homework. How hard could it be?




A few weeks later, there I was, staring at an excel sheet, looking at a black google slides page and desperately searching for significance. It's not so easy to come to conclusions when your graphs don't look like what you expected, and your error bars are larger than the actual data. I really struggled to figure out what our results really meant, and how to get any meaning out of them. It took a lot of analyzing, re-analyzing, error bars, t tests, office hours, and more analyzing, but eventually, we wrote ourselves a data summary.  Obviously it took a lot more than just a few hours,  but I'm proud of us for making it to the end of Mod 1. Even though the data summary was difficult, I appreciate how much I learned from having to write it. 

I didn't fully grasp quite how much I'd learned until it was time to do the mini-presentation, and I realized that I actually knew what I was talking about and would be able to describe the project to anyone in only 3 minutes. Not only did I become an expert on "pinches of magic dust", but I also learned how to translate experiments we did in the lab to meaningful words that effectively communicate the importance of our experiments. 

I have to add that I really appreciated having my lab partner to work with on the Mod 1 data summary. Between all the lab math, re-analyzing of data, re-making of graphs, excel crashing on my computer, and figuring out how to get google slides into portrait mode, I could not have done it without her! This assignment wasn't easy, but it would've been even harder if we didn't have each other. So thanks Cathy :)


-Cydney


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