“It’s heavy, but also really empowering”



That’s how I felt when I (finally!) got my Class of 2020 ring this past Friday. Even though I had been wearing a ring for a month prior to delivery so I could get used to the embrace of a metal band on my right ring finger, it was different with the real thing. It weighed more, but it also felt more meaningful.
Writing my first ever scientific journal article felt the same way. It was heavy, especially in the twenty-four hours before the deadline, but after, it left me feeling very empowered and strangely more convinced that I enjoyed my coursework.
In retrospect, though, there were definitely certain actions I took that helped me write this paper and some that could have avoided me a lot of sighs and headaches if I had taken them. Here’s what I learned after this major mod2 assignment:
- Completing figures early is a great call
            I knew that 50% of our grade was about results and figures and creating figures early on immensely helped me in getting a big picture of what I wanted the meat of my paper to be about and making me feel like the paper was more manageable once 50% of it was out of the way. Another helpful feature of getting my figures done early was that I was able to get feedback from both the instructors and the BE Communications lab. Both were extremely helpful in helping me gauge whether or not what I wanted to convey was in fact being conveyed.
            - Outlines, not diamonds, are a girl’s best friend
            Even before crafting figures, I struggled a lot in trying to meaningfully piece the information we had collected in our research together, and, as I have before, I employed the ever-powerful outline as an aide. Laying out what I wanted to speak about for each section of the paper helped me assay the flow and connectivity of all the points I was trying to make. Talking through the outline with faculty or even just out loud, proved a very useful logic check for the paper as a whole.   
            - Dynamic writing
            After making my figures, I thought I had it all figured out. Turns out, I found the writing process much more dynamic than I expected it to be. Previously, when writing other types of paper, such as humanities essays, I found that I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to write about coming into the actual writing process. With this paper, I found as I continued to interpret and re-interpret my data, the overall takeaway of the paper changed a couple of times and so did my focus.
            - Start early
            I learned this lesson the hard way. I did not give myself nearly enough time to complete this research paper, more importantly to revise it. When you see the word BRCA2-/- and DLD-1 more than 20 times a day, it all starts to blend together and become an indistinguishable mess. Thus, giving yourself enough time to get away from your paper once you’ve written it is definitely something I wish I had done.

If you noticed the word “help” was a theme in this post, it’s because it was. I couldn’t have completed this paper without the help of all the 109 and BE faculty and staff and peers. Best advice for writing a research paper: get feedback and get lots of it.




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