Module 1 Blog Post

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 how to align them and read them was fun and all but the aspect of working with excel to find the robust z scores, means, and all of those annoying calculations was the actual bane of my existence. It got to the point where it became a running joke between me and my partner that Lily was definitely emotional and mentally gone by the end of that day because Excel had completely broke her.


















Regardless of the excel though, all of the other experiments went really well and I surprisingly had very few bumps. Instead, all of the data seemed to go exactly as it should have and our results were always very promising. However, when we finally got our DSF results back, it was pretty disheartening to see that the shift of Tm 1) wasn't very much and 2) seemed to actually decrease from the DMSO instead of increase. I won't lie and say that I probably had my hopes up by a lot unreasonably but I was hoping I would get some interesting data with the ligands we chose.

BUT THE STORY DOESN'T END THERE

Sunday night rolls around and I'm writing the data summary with everything stating that our hypothesis was wrong, nothing was statistically significant, and everything was for nothing (not really). But this was all based on assumptions and I hadn't actually calculated the p-values yet. Truth be told, I didn't know how until 30 minutes before it was due. Then I figureD it out, went through excel AND OH MY GOODNESS OUR P VALUES WERE SO SMALL. Then I frantically went through the entire data summary and changed everything to statistically significant and put in the p-values and submitted that document. 

On a side note though, I'm not going to lie, I thought that I knew how to write scientifically but I've definitely been proven wrong and learned A LOT about how to actually write scientifically and am really excited about these writing skills I've learned. Do I feel as if some of the feedback I get is really nit-picky and a little bit unnecessary? Of course. But overall, the teaching staff has been amazing at giving me some really valuable feedback about how to write better in general. 

Overall, Module 1 was surprisingly an unexpected and wild ride. It was fun, I'm tired from the data summary, and I still can't get over the fact that my data ended up being significant! 

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