20.109 Module #1... a moment... that is most pleasing to me, in my career...

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 neat. The biggest challenge when working with the data was figuring out how to display significance (a separate graph? highlighting it in the figure?) Needless to say my MATLAB skills improved dramatically. 😎


Writing analysis for the data itself was probably the most challenging part for me. Because I'm so visual, I feel like pictures are the best way to describe things so when I have an idea I need to communicate with words, I have a hard time getting it from my brain onto paper. 

 It was also really funny to get back my methods section that I worked on with my partner and see it get demolished to half its size. 

 Now that I've gotten substantive feedback on all of my work (-minus the Data Summary) I feel a lot more prepared to take on the research report in Mod 2. I'll probably still tackle the graphs first and get some feedback on how to display my significance from the get-go. I'll also start with outlines for each section that will help set a foundation from me to build from.

 Overall I have to say I have really, really loved 20.109!!! It's the first class that I've taken that has truly made me feel like a bioengineer. Course 6's just need a computer to do computer science but course 20's don't have a lab in their bedroom which I think creates distance between us and our major. I always talk to my friends about how much I like the class and also how much work it is.
Enjoy this gif I made about 20.109

 -Francisco Zepeda


Referenced YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITP1QfRAFEw

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