Much data... such wow!

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I don’t think my computer has ever had to handle more tabs open on chrome or excel than it did for the week leading up to the research article deadline. I don’t think I’ve ever written a piece of scientific communication as extensive as this one or spent this much time on a single assignment before. I also don’t think I’ve been as satisfied with any other assignment as I am now, looking back at what I learned through this process and at the final product that I created.


The RNA-seq data felt like a gigantic maze. There were so many different paths you could take, and so many storylines that could result depending on the path you took. Sometimes the genes I was looking at or the GO terms I decided to investigate felt almost random. I found myself continuously getting distracted by different threads in the data, investigating them, either finding some interesting conclusion, deciding the thread was no longer interesting or getting pulled into some different thread. I wished for a more systematic way to approach the data and more logical tools to use to take a giant mass of data and make some sort of sense out of it.


I found it quite difficult to use the limited tools we were taught in R to actually come up with a coherent storyline. I ended up having to search online for more ways to use R and for handy websites that were useful for parsing through long lists of GO terms. It was also difficult for me to know when to stop... I had a dilemma where 1) enjoyed investigating different trends in the data, but 2) didn’t want to spend too much time on this one assignment... which I definitely ended up doing anyway :) I’m excited to learn how to actually implement some of the further analysis that we were taught about theoretically in class.


Mod 2 overall made me excited about ~big data~ and made me want to learn more about how to analyze RNA-seq or utilize computation and systems biology in different ways to aid biological research. I’m again thankful for the homework assignments and the continuous feedback that made writing the paper easier in the end.

It's probably time for me to figure out what's been going on in my other classes now...

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