JC matured me

Honestly, I was so dreading journal club. I was so afraid that someone would ask me why the researchers used TopHat software or why they chose to represent gene length by minimizing the binomial probability of it occurring. I googled every little thing from the difference between isoforms and variants to the specific reagents needed to do FISH. Out of fear and paranoia, I learned everything with my limited 7.05 knowledge. And then journal club happened. The ten minutes went by in a flash (and trust me, I was definitely RUSHING to get all the information across and used a lot of "ums," 'and, like," "so yeah") and then people asked super reasonable questions. Afterwards, after my epinephrine and adrenaline levels went down, I was surprisingly mad. I was mad that I prepared all this obscure esoteric material and people asked questions about things I rushed through. After I got over my ridiculous anger, I was kind of sad (wow, it's almost as if I'm going through the five stages of grief) because 1) I wish I didn't try to pack so much information into my presentation and 2) the article was pretty dang cool after I did all the research and 3) I wish everyone could read it.

Journal club revealed to me that research and research articles are way more dense than they seem to be. There are so many cool and interesting ways to validate the same information and so many innovative ways to use the limited samples (my paper used breast tissue samples from real patients) they had. After reading my paper and really dissecting each part, I was so struck by the amount of work and thought put into making these figures that we only take a quick glance at. For example, IHC stains are thrown around all the time, but doing a full IHC stain with primary and secondary antibodies takes at least two days (not to mention the cost involved in buying said antibodies), and on top of that, you have to fight with other people for confocal time to take images of your slides. Maybe I am romanticizing research, but I was so in awe of the dedication these researches put into their work (which I used as a proxy for their passion towards the project). I only hope that one day I can dedicate my life to something I feel so strongly about. When I say JC matured me, I really mean it, both in terms of stress and in my outlook for life.

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