R you kidding me?

^ my reaction when I realized the research article was due the day after ring delivery. Despite my attempts to plan ahead by scheduling Comm lab appointments and trying to finish the assignment before ring delivery, I still found myself working on it all day Saturday.

Cathy and I trying to take pictures when all we can think about is our unfinished research article

Besides the due date, this assignment came with many other challenges. For one, having to write this without my amazing lab partner (pictured above) was difficult. It was so nice during the Mod 1 data summary to have someone else to bounce ideas off of and look over everything the other person wrote. Also, I did not anticipate how much time this report would take until I was working on the homework assignment where we had to make the qPCR figure, results, and discussion. After spending a lot of time on the analysis for just that one figure, I realized that this research article was going to take quite some time and thought. Analyzing data that does not look the way you expected it to and trying to make a story about it is a task that we now have some more experience in, but it still isn't easy. It can be hard to explain why you did the next experiment when you don't actually know why, you just did what Josephine told you to... 

Another challenge was using R for the RNA-seq data analysis. I actually think the R stuff is conceptually really cool, but it was extremely confusing at times. Shout out to Amanda for writing all the code, because I cannot imagine having to write that on my own! 

Now that Mod 2 is over, I'm really looking forward to Mod 3. It's crazy to think that we're in the last module of 20.109. I feel like just yesterday we were learning what FKBP12 is (haha tbt), and now we're planning how to build our batteries! I'm excited to see what the rest of this class has in store :) 

-Cydney

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