Struggle bus

These past 3 days have been the most stressful days of my entire life. I spent the entirety of last week organizing a huge event for a student group I'm President of, PaksMIT. When I finally got done with it on Friday night, I realized something: I had to write MY ENTIRE RESEARCH ARTICLE IN ONE DAY! I realize now that in the last week, some priorities were misplaced and some regrettable choices were made, but I, (yet again) underestimating how much time it takes me to communicate science and not word-vomit, thought (naively) that I could probably do it within 10-12 hours.

I'm pretty sure I have permanent eye-damage from staring at my laptop screen for 10 hours straight. But despite the focus and commitment with which I had started, I realized by 7 PM the next day that there was no way I would be able to submit it by 10. It wasn't just time, I just had a lot of questions and I somehow managed to not go to any office hours in the past week so I suffered in silence for a while before emailing Leslie with a storm of questions (who promptly replied to me despite it being the weekend!). I also got a ton of help from course 20 upperclassmen like Ayse and Barbarah, who helped me understand some things like PCAs that had just gone over my head during lecture. And of course, my knight in shining armor, my lab partner, Afeefah, who helped me get over that cell viability result hump. Despite the struggle bus that I was on, I just wanted to acknowledge all the people who helped me finish this research article, submitted on Sunday at 9:59 PM.

Most of what I wrote in the last hour is a blur, and I apologize in advance if some of it ended up being word-vomit. If not about RNA-seq data, if not about coding in R, if not about science communication, at the very least, I learned an extremely valuable lesson about how much I am capable of accomplishing in 2 days, and how I work best (spoiler alert: the answer is never to stay locked up in your room alone for 10+ hours).

I know that the primary purpose of these blog posts is to reflect on *actual* 20.109 related things, but I'm really glad that this outlet exists for me to rant and let out all the frustration that comes with being in this class (despite it being awesome and interesting and having great faculty and peers, its just a lot of work, you know what I mean).

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