Module 1 Reflection...

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 four weeks, the main purpose of this module became crystal clear as we created an abstract that summed up our work in one short but meaningful paragraph. I found it incredibly rewarding to get to work with my lab partner for this data summary and compare our interpretations of our results and talk through the importance of every assay or gel we ran. 

 All in all, Module 1 taught me a lot about how I should approach technical scientific writing and will definitely help me as I write a full research report for Module 2. Moving forward, I have a list of small things such as writing in a passive voice and making sure I don’t include results in my captions, that I will continue to work on in Module 2, and the remainder of my scientific career. 

 PS. I would like the make a special shout out to the wonderful teaching faculty who never failed to answer my email questions and consistently offered invaluable feedback :) Thank you!!!

- Margaret Zhang

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #2

Edit 4/18 (Forgot to put my name): Justin Liu Originally published 4/8 The Journal Club assignment marked my first time truly understanding a published journal article. Sure, previous UROP positions had required me to get some background information on the project by scanning a few papers. However, all I really did for those was scan the introduction and figures and then have my supervisor actually explain it to me. Thus, I was very unsure of what to expect for this presentation. Will other people care about my presentation? Will I be interested in the material? Will I even be able to understand it? It turns out that the answer to the second and third questions was yes, but I can't exactly speak for the first question. While working on creating the presentation, the most surprising thing was how much of the authors' data that I had to cut out. I felt very reluctant to leave out charts and data that I understood, and it took a lot of mental gymnastics to convince myself tha
Read more

The Journey of A Revision Begins With Office Hours

First major assignment of 20.109 is done, locked in the books. Looking back at it, the entire process from the initial draft to the revisions that were made couldn't have been possible without the availability of the staff and the time spent in office hours.  To the Comm Lab Fellows, thank you for meeting with us at a day's notice. For sitting down and break our abstract apart. For showing us what worked well and what didn't. For helping our abstract go from needs improvement to significantly improved. To Leslie, thank you for bearing with the hundreds of emails we sent your way. For patiently replying to us anytime and every time we needed tips and suggestions. For spending hours in office hours before the first draft was due. For meeting to go over last minute questions before the revision was due.  And to my lab partner, Tooba, thanks for sitting with me late into the night to tear apart our on work. For working with me to identify our weakness and create a s
Read more
The research proposal was a really great exercise in identifying a current problem and potential, feasible solution within a practical time period. While the other modules introduced and familiarized us to the actual lab work and etiquette needed to answer a research question, the goals, quality checks, and troubleshooting considerations weren't thought of by us. That being said, this research proposal was a more difficult assignment in many regards. Browsing through the discussion sections of numerous papers I was interested in gave me an idea of what a next step would be, but considering that I had no real expertise in any of those areas it was still difficult to identify what specific assays would be needed for those next steps. Because of this, I also had a hard time deciding on a general area for my topic. In this regard, listing 5 areas and then trying to blend them with my partners' helped us define a creative topic area that we could look more into. The timescale for
Read more