All. Of. The. Emotions.

I just submitted my research article, and I have to say, I'm feeling all. of. the. emotions. Of course, I've been working on this-- and only this-- for the past week and a half, putting in 60+ hours, so it's logical that I would feel all the things over the course of writing this article. Some of my feelings include: dread, excitement, worry, stress, apprehension, fear, anger, frustration, despair, helplessness, confidence, tiredness, sad, overwhelmed, triumphant, proud, relieved, and nervous.

This paper was mentally and physically demanding. I sacrificed a lot of things for this paper: sleep, a normal eating schedule, marathon Monday, my tendency to avoid caffeine if I can help it, my sanity (I'm kidding), and, most recently, spending time with my family. However, I'm incredibly proud of the product I turned in. Every word of the 5,073 I submitted was chosen carefully. I wrote, rewrote, criticized, got feedback on, rewrote, and revised sections and figures until I was happy with them. I'm nervous about how my paper will be perceived, and I realized that the 14 page limit is truly constraining; there's so much more I would like to talk about! That being said, I'm happy to be done with the paper.

I'm glad I started early. However, I'm frustrated that I was unable to see expectations clearly the first time. Pulling from the wiki, the comm lab, lectures, pre-labs, and verbal instructions, I tried to piece together exactly what was expected of us. I wanted to understand that from the get-go in order to be best prepared to tackle the paper. But on Thursday in lab I discovered I had unknowingly omitted a significant portion of the RNA-seq data that should have been included. I wish I had been more careful in outlining expectations.

I'm glad I went to the comm lab. This past week, I attended 3 different sessions in the comm lab to get feedback on everything. 1 of the meetings was unhelpful, 1 marginally so, and 1 incredibly so. Even if the sessions weren't super useful, I'm glad I sought out feedback as a sanity check. If anything, it was nice to explain the project and thought process over and over-- it helped make the storyline apparent for me.

I'm glad I did RNA-seq analysis. Using R and doing RNA-seq made me realize that I never want to do that again. As much as I love TC and bioe, I realized that the computational side of bio probably isn't for me. I strongly disliked having to code to be able to analyze my data. I can handle excel spreadsheets, but this was a lot for me, and I struggled immensely with what the code meant. Even though we had the exercise sheets written up for us, I wish we had been taught more R. I read and reread those sheets, but they didn't answer a lot of questions, and it took a long time for me to get accustomed to the code.

Now, I'm feeling proud, relieved, and nervous-- I just want to know my grade now!

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