BE 20.109(S19) Class blog

Hi all! I really like 20.109 so far. Even though I have had experience in lab for urops etc., I found that a lot of protocols or explanations to be "oh we've always done it this way." I appreciate how this class teaches you the why's and how's very explicitly. Now onto Mod 1 specific details: I really like how we had to complete the data summary with our lab partners. While these experiments always have a general purpose or lesson to be learned, hearing my lab partner's perspective on what we've done or how he interpreted the data interests me. What I enjoy about science is that the data are always there, but the meaning and context of the data have to be studied and explained. Though I like discussing the data analysis, I absolutely dislike writing it (passive tense KILLS me), especially given that we have to be really precise with our wording. I definitely prefer big-picture idea to the small details. However, I have to say that writing the abstract

Before I began 20.109, I hadn't heard anything about the class so I started from a tabula rasa . I knew it was lab class and a CI-M and that was about it. I had already UROP'ed for a year so I had some wet lab skills down that I had learned apprenticeship-style from the postdoc I worked with. We were also working on publishing a paper so I had decent exposure to that process. But 20.109 flipped everything I knew upside down!  Oftentimes during my UROP I can find myself mindlessly completing the task at hand, but there was no room for this in 20.109 where you have to understand every step of the process and the role of every reagent you use. The writing assignments hit me hard too. I had never had to be so intentional and thought with the titles and captions I was creating. Then the Data Summary came and took me by storm. I'm a very visual person so I wanted to start with the plots. It was so much work to write up a script that would make all of them look uniform and

To start i'd like to share this advanced, high level, pro tip with you all: Read the wiki so you don't end up doing paired work by yourself. Not really that much fun. Overall the data summary was interesting in that is was fairly different from any scientific writing I had done in the past. In my previous UROP we weren't thinking too hard about the language we used on our poster and the writing for our website was done largely by others. Other course 20 classes don't really require any writing other than the occasional paragraph or 320 final project. Covering all sides of a report from abstract to figure captions to methods was definitely a learning experience. For me the hardest part of any scientific writing is simply getting started. The actual amount of time I spent typing up the data summary wasn't that long, the majority of the time I dedicated to the data summary was spent staring at the screen and trying to think of what to write. Then once I finish I n

Looking back on the first month of 20.109, I would believe that the class is one of the most work-intensive classes in the bio-engineering major, if not among all classes at MIT. Being one of the few juniors in the class, and have taken other lab classes and CI-Ms, I see 20.109 to be very unique in that it exhibits great balance between training both writing skills and experimental techniques. While the class and the lab hours are dedicated mostly on developing intuitions and skills on the relevant techniques, the homework assignments and the respective feedback provide us an ample of opportunity to practice on scientific writing. For the first couple weeks of class, I must admit that I was baffled with the work load. Not only is there a huge amount of assignments, but each assignment also contains a non-trivial amount of thinking. Even when I was writing a simple one-paragraph-long method section, I had to contemplate on every single sentence to see whether the expression was the

Scientific writing was a new beast for me. I learned really quickly that taking down this beast would not be very easy. In fact, I dare say it beat me down to absolute submission. In all seriousness, learning how to write scientifically has a large learning curve for me. Like a really large learning curve. Like Jupiter sized. Like the shame I bring to my family and lab partner sized. However, I think I made some progress. I felt that all of the sections had their own challenges. The abstract, for example, I felt was a balancing act of having the background, results, and future implications while maintaining the right amount of jargon. Meanwhile, for captions and methods there was balancing act of including just the right amount information where it's not too vague, but not overwhelmingly gratuitous. Every sentence has to be precise. Balance. That seems to be key to scientific writing. Just dry enough to bore anyone reading to tears, but interesting enough to give hope to your rea

Something that surprised me about the data summary was how useful it is to have communication taught to you. I’ve read some scientific papers before and even written some similar pieces of my own, but there are a lot of tips and tricks that were taught to us in this class that made the scientific writing process a lot clearer to me. As someone who likes to think about things in terms of frameworks, being taught about the hourglass layout of an abstract, for example, helped me get a much better idea of how scientific information can be presented in a clear, concise way. On the other side of things, completing the data summary gave me a better idea of how much effort goes into writing a scientific paper. Each subsection of every figure is the result of a hard worked experiment. Every detail in the caption must be carefully thought out in order to present the results clearly. Creating an introduction section requires extensive research into background literature and creating a discus

I love 20.109 so far. Doing actual lab work is a refreshing change from all the theory heavy pre-requisite classes most of us Course 20 sophomores have been taking the last few semesters. During the past month and a half, I’ve come to a few realizations: One, writing in bullets is a great way to draft research articles. Two, the amount of space an item gets in your research article does not always correspond to the amount of time you spent on it. And three, doing wet lab experiments is just like…baking. I learned how to bake over the summer and surprisingly, I found myself going through the same motions in lab. First, you read the recipe/lab procedures to get an overall sense. Next, you make adjustments: for baking, (if you’re like me) you compare at least four different recipes for the same food and also read all the suggested alterations made by people in the comments. You take into account the ingredients you have or don’t have, and scale up or down if you don’t have the right s

I've always been a storyteller. In elementary school, my stories consisted of animated gestures and fluctuations in pitch. Since then, my stories have moved on to paper. The images I once created in thin air suddenly were captured in combinations of words. I like focusing on the little details. On capturing every little aspect of the stories I tell.  In practice, that means long flowy sentences with a heavy use of descriptive language. In other words, I'm a firm believer in fluffy language. That all said, the transition over to scientific language is incredibly difficult for me. Not because of the jargon or structure, but because (at least at first glance) it feels formulaic. There's a specific spot for every statement that needs to be made. In the early assignments of Mod 1, my inner storyteller fought the simplicity of scientific literature. It wanted to mention every little detail about every little thing. Through the constant feedback that was received in each ass

Sometimes, I’ll start reading a paper, think it’s really interesting, and just dive into the rabbit hole of looking through the references, and then through the references of the references, and then the references of the references of the references and you get the idea. I’ll admit it, I just really enjoy reading papers. Or so I thought. I didn’t realize until we started making figures and writing figure captions for the Mod1 assignments that writing any sort of concise, yet thorough scientific report is really such a struggle. First, I would always spend way too much time painstakingly editing the figures in Google Slides because I have absolutely zero Photoshop skills, then when it came to the caption, I always started incorrectly by interpreting the data, and above all, I was constantly trying to find the balance between spoon-feeding every detail and outlining just the big picture. Basically, no matter how hard I tried, my figures were never even close to the

Emotion 1: Terror "Wet lab? What's that?????????" As someone who's only experience with wet lab before this class was small bursts of tissue culture work, the concept of pipetting on a biweekly basis utterly terrified me. To add to that, navigating how to write figure captions, an abstract, and concise results summary was completely foreign and daunting.  Emotion 2: Anxiety Most of my "scientific writing" in the past has been oriented around public policy and clinical studies, where the more wordy and convoluted your paper sounds, the better. After getting my first few assignments back with a long list of comments from Noreen, the sound of my nervous laughter has definitely become associated with this class. This feedback, regardless of how stressful it is to read, has really helped me develop over the course of this module. Writing concise figure titles and captions has become (almost) second nature to me, and I've been able to find w

So much data... Every time a friend of mine asked how I was doing in my classes, I would always make a point to say how much I'm learning in 20.109. In terms of research techniques/experience, I feel like I've been falling behind relative to my peers, but 20.109 is helping me give that perspective with wet lab techniques and just how to conduct biological research in general. It's also just been interesting to learn how we should  communicate our science versus how the science is actually communicated at times. The goal is not to always use big smart fancy-shmancy words to show off how smart and sophisticated you are. Rather, the goal of communicating your science is to, well, communicate it. You want to spread the word of your research such that a wide audience of people will be able to understand it. Though, trying to make your research easy to understand doesn't mean it's an easy to do process for the researcher.  Going into the data summary, I was

Scientific writing is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'd say the most challenging part was figuring out how to be both concise and informative. At the beginning of the module, I was definitely under the impression that being informative meant word-vomiting everything I had learned onto a piece of paper. Quickly learned that was not  what being informative meant, at all. I think that this has improved my scientific communications skills. I also think that the data summary draft was a good way for me to get a better sense of how to understand the significance (or insignificance...looking at you, DSF assay) of particular scientific results. For example, when we were writing the background section of the draft, it was very interesting to see just how much research has been done on FKBP12 already. This made it difficult to talk about the significance of our findings, because we had to be careful not to make sweeping generalizations about the current literature on FKBP12. I i

I think one of the biggest struggles in science generally is running an experiment that doesn't end up working. Knowing you spent all that time and your little cells or proteins or whatever don't do what you want them to do. But hey science is all about failure right? *nervous laugh* And that's what makes it so much more satisfying the one time it does work!! :)) What I found challenging about this module was conveying failure in our data summary in a way to make it not sound like failure and basically convey that they should still read my report even though we didn't have any concrete results. Also, making it align with my story and the whole "importance of it all" stuff. What I learned about this module was that technical writing isn't as easy as it might seem at first. Coming into this I thought since your'e writing the objective science that it would be much easier than a creative piece and you wouldn't have to think about it too much. Turn

Looking back at Module 1, I am proud of how much progress I have made. I remember the frustration I felt when I first was creating the gel electrophoresis figure. I spent hours wracking my brain about so many things: what is the best title sentence for this image? how should I structure the caption? what details are enough for the reader to understand? These were only the first of many questions I had. After meeting with BE communication lab the next day, I came to the realization that although there were loose boundaries about how you should structure a figure, the beauty of being of researcher was the personal interpretations and choices that you get to make when presenting your results. From that point forward, I found that with more practice, writing figures wasn’t so bad. Another breakthrough occurred while I was creating the data summary with my lab partner. As we spent hours slowly piecing together all the figures, schematics, and results we had compiled throughout the past f

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I hate making figures, And I bet you do too. --- The utmost respect goes to those who can write good figure captions. For whatever reason, it always takes me a long time to write a caption, and more than a couple iterations to make it half-decent. I really hope this is one of those things you get better at with practice, because if I am going to be spending 4-5 hours on a tiny figure every single time, science might not be my thing. Maybe though, caption-writing is just the fruit of a large tree; perhaps, the ability to write concisely about science is imperative for making good captions in a reasonable amount of time. Writing concisely had not been an issue for me before. I remember back in the day when I had to write essays, my final draft would always be very close to the word minimum, and not even because I was too lazy to write more--I genuinely did say all that I needed to say in the minimum word count. However, to me science writing

If I had to encapsulate the entire module in one phrase, it would be "so close, yet so far away." Why, you ask? Let's first start off with the creation of a figure and caption for the gel electrophoresis. There I was, sitting at my desk, cranking out the picture of my gel, thinking "Oh, this shouldn't take more than 20 minutes tops." An hour passes by, with a less than average title and a caption that is either too descriptive or not descriptive enough. Next was the schematic. I feverishly search Biorender looking for the perfect picture to represent the small molecule microarray. I end up using a picture of 96 well plate because its close enough. We then had to write a Methods section. My partner and I go back and forth asking each other questions in which we both don't know the answer to. Is it ok to have two parentheses right next to each other? Is including this volume necessary? A couple hours pass by and voilà! A methods full of uncerta

Based on research papers I read, I was under the impression that scientific writing should be filled with technical terms, smart-sounding big words, and roundabout logic that only the smartest of the smart could understand. Except apparently it doesn't work like that... Interestingly, one of the trickiest things about scientific writing that I learned (or am still trying to learn) during this module was finding the balance between jargon and colloquialism. I used to think that if I couldn't grasp the message of a paper or read a graph, it was my fault for not being smart enough to understand it. Now, I realize that the goal of scientific writing is maximum clarity. Using the same word repeatedly is encouraged because switching names can be misleading. Redundancy is often not viewed as excessive but helpful since it indicates to the reader the main takeaways from the paper. I then thought it would be an easy change to make since I should be writing more directly than before,

Honestly I would just like to begin this post with a statement: I aBsolUteLy hATe exCEl  This module was really interesting and introduced me to a knew technique/experimental method that I actually never heard of before and this really excited me since I already had a large amount of wet lab experience before coming into class and I was really hoping that the class wouldn't be repetitive in teaching me how to pipette or grow c. elegans or something like that. Instead, I learned about SMMs which were actually very novel to me and I felt like I thoroughly learned a lot of new things. I hadn't gone through a detailed process of purifying protein much less studying protein-ligand binding so everything was completely new for me. That doesn't go to say that everything in the module was sunshine and rainbows and enjoyable though. Although I can't pinpoint which day was the best for me, I definitely know which one was the worst: Day 3. Reading the SMM slides and learning

I remember daydreaming last summer about making a scientific discovery. I won't go into too much detail but in my daydream , as soon as I make the this HUGE breakthrough that's going to change the world of biological sciences, I go back home and write out a research paper that I show to my supervisor the very next day. My supervisor looks at my obviously flawless paper and immediately sends it to Nature, completely in awe of this freshman UROP. Mod 1 in 20.109 has made me realize  another logistical concern that invalidates this whole daydream, namely my inability to write a flawless research paper within a night. As you may have guessed already, I grossly underestimated how much time it takes me to communicate science. I have, without fail, spent almost every Monday and Wednesday night so far, realizing that the Mod1 assignment due the next day cannot possibly be done in 20 minutes and then frantically spent an hour or two or three producing material that still probably fal