Research article? More like REEEEEEEEEEsearch article

At 10pm I logged into stellar. At 10:01pm, stellar asked me to complete DUO two-step authentication. At 10:02pm, I submitted my research article. At 10:03pm, I submitted my figures. At 10:08pm I realized that only my figures were seen as a "selected submission" and reuploaded my research article. At 10:09pm, I emailed Noreen both my research article and the figures because I didn't know what had actually uploaded. At 12:30pm I realized I spelled Professor Fraenkel's name wrong.

So my process of submitting the paper was an absolute mess. What about my process of writing it?

Not bad actually.

The instructors have asked: what was the most useful resource I had while writing this paper? My answer is Amanda Kedaigle, local R expert.
See, the code provided for students to analyze their RNAseq data really only lets you do a few things, lets you see one or two pieces of the puzzle. If you want to manipulate your data more, or even better understand the figures that the original code spit out, or even make good looking figures, you need to know how to code in R. And I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag.
I wanted to rearrange the data into figures that fit my narrative. I wanted to access the data that we hadn't seen in the exercises. And Amanda allowed me to do all of that. She gave me code and coached me through implementing it so that I could get the figures I wanted. When I was at office hours for 3 hours straight on Wednesday, bashing my head against the bench trying to fit the pieces together, Amanda came and cut me out some new better-fitting puzzle pieces. It was the best.

On the writing side, nothing was more helpful in writing my own research article than preparing for the journal club presentation. Analyzing an article piece-by-piece with the faculty, then reading an article in-depth on my own allowed me to get a good sense of all the parts of a research article and what normal science writing sounded like. Having these two other articles in my head gave me a kind of template to follow, and it also served as a jumping off point for finding literature related to our research to use in the introduction and discussion. I'm also thankful for daily homework assignments where we received feedback on rough drafts of each section, but without first reading those articles, I wouldn't have had any idea where to start. And now I see the wisdom of putting journal club presentations smack in the middle of Mod 2.

Hasta la vista, Mod 2. It wasn't nice knowing you, but at least I've got some transferable skills now.

                                                                                                                       Happy researching,
                                                                                    Melody

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