What even is R?

I started off Mod2 thinking that it would be really cool to know exactly what you're doing with every experiment and to fully understand a project from start to finish. I know personally in my urop that sometimes gets lost for me and I'm just following protocols and doing busy work.

At first I was very on top of things and I was engaged in class and I thought it was very cool that we were doing things with big data and engineering topics. This is why I chose course 20- to approach biological problems from new perspectives and learn about research in a unique way. However, I quickly got lost when we started doing the analysis in R. I felt very overwhelmed by how different this was than other experiments and analyses I had done and it all felt very foreign and confusing.

I am often not confident learning things on my own when expectations aren't clearly laid out and I feel like this assignment was a good challenge to that. In the end, I learned a lot and actually felt more empowered to do these types of experiments. I thought the mod was actually really interesting and made me think a lot about the scientific process and connecting between different experiments.

Writing this report was definitely overwhelming and took a lot more time than I thought. But aside from the minutia of what section to put what in, I thought it was really rewarding in the type of thinking it made me use. I felt like I was thinking like a real scientist in putting these data together.

I have really loved 109 so far despite the amount of work it has been. I am really looking forward to the last mod.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Presentation

The presentation went well. I think it was super helpful to fake present to classmates and instructors. Getting feedback from people who didn't know very much about our topic was really important for overcoming the bias of information. That’s when you know more than your audience and because of this assume a certain level of literacy with your topic that your audience doesn’t necessarily have. We practiced a lot to different people and I think that paid off and turned a presentation that was initially inscrutable and complex to something that was logical and understandable. 
Read more

Mod 3 experience

I was initially worried after reading the introduction of Mod 3. I didn't necessarily understand what was going on at first and I did not want to work with batteries as I thought this was not what I signed up for. However, as time went on and we continued to learn what was going on, this was a really fun module. I genuinely enjoyed working on the lab, seeing the TEM results, and constructing our batteries. To think we can use our skills as biological engineers to make batteries is quite interesting. Also, the fact that the paper is roughly 3 papers makes it so much easier to do. Our presentations were also really interesting and I really like all of the ideas that I've heard from my peers. It really taught me that we're not that far away from writing our own papers in the future and coming up with ideas for research projects. Overall, 20.109 has equipped me with the essentials to be a biological engineer but most importantly, how to communicate with others in our field.
Read more

Don’t judge a module by first sight!

Different from Module 1 and Module 2, Module 3 is less molecular biology focused and not directly related to medicine. At the beginning of Module 3, I thought that I would enjoy this module less as it seemed less relevant to my primary interest in medicine and cancer research. However, I was wrong. I truly enjoyed this module, from TEM to making batteries, from brainstorming research ideas to presenting our research proposal. It was my second time seeing TEM samples, but it was just as fascinating as the first time. The phage nanowires were intertwined with evenly distributed gold nanoparticles, and the gold atomic planes were so regular and amazingly beautiful. On the last day of Module 3, it was so exciting to see batteries being made, and to light up LEDs using batteries with the cathodes we made! The unimaginable beauty in the order, simplicity, and complexity of nature, from atoms to nanoparticles, from proteins to cells to organisms, is what drew me to biology in the...
Read more