I have a Data Summary, but where are my brownies?

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 sized baking pan. For 20.109, all the reagents are taken care of course. But you also consider factors like cutting down the incubation times from an hour to 50 minutes due to constraints in time or lowering the concentration of protein in your sample because the first set of teams to run the assay learned the hard way that it was too much.

Then you set up your stations. You measure out your ingredients/reagents using measuring cups/pipettors into bowls/Eppendorf tubes. And then you follow the instructions one by one. You look back and forth at the recipe/protocol, double checking the volumes, making sure you didn’t miss a step. If you’re confused, you consult YouTube videos to see how the batter is supposed to look, or call your Mom. In lab, you go and ask Leslie and Catherine repeatedly to make sure you’re doing things right.

The only difference is the end result. If you did it right, you have a fresh batch of cookies that taste like happiness. If you did it wrong, you are met with the smell of smoke, the wailing of the fire alarm. (Not that it’s happened to me). For an experiment, you get data. If you’re extremely lucky, they are the results you are looking for, and all those four-hour blocks spent in lab feel worth it. Otherwise, you cry (internally or externally) and try to figure out where you went wrong (e.g. the control had more activity than the actual protein because we accidentally swapped the samples). Whether you like the outcome or not, the fun is now over. You’re left with dishes in the sink, and a paper to write up. The latter is definitely harder, as I learned last week from the Data Summary.

Summarizing your research sounds so easy but is a lot harder in reality. You want the reader to fully understand what’s going on, but you also want to keep it short and concise and include only the most important and necessary details. You want to word things in the best possible way, it’s easy to get carried away trying to make it perfect. I found myself spending hours trying to format a single graph just so it would look a certain way. I kept editing and reediting the minor details. Are the plotted points too large? Can the reader distinguish between the lines? Are the colors right? In the end however, it felt worth it because it is attention to all these small things that add up to the overall aesthetic, the neatness, and the professionalism of the final work.

Well, now the Data Summary draft is done. As I await the impending Data Summary Revision and Research Article, I’ll go make some brownies and maybe try to get a head-start.

-Maisha