This journal paper was really a struggle, but thankfully we made it through! From talking to my 20.109 predecessors, I knew that the research article was going to be one of the most time intensive and difficult things I had to do at MIT so far. With this in mind, I tried to start as early as possible, however I quickly realized that I couldn't really start if I didn't completely understand what was going on (lol).

Because of my lack of previous knowledge in R, I took me a really long time to understand everything. It was also hard to figure out what the data was saying because of the lack of significance in results. I wish we had slightly more instruction in R and knew more about the actual data sets, because there were so many simple things that I would have known how to do in python that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the syntax for in R.

Going to almost every office hours available really helped me build a more cohesive story in the end, because as soon as I would start to write something, I would get confused and second guess myself.It was really nice being able to bounce ideas off of the instructors, as well as talk to other students there who were just as confused as I was. Also the BE comm lab was really helpful in providing a more objective perspective that could still make sense of my article.

SHOUT OUT TO FRANCISCO AND ABENA. I really thought I was done with my research article for a second there, then we decided to peer review each others and I was so glad that it was them ripping my figures to shreds and (hopefully) not the 20.109 instructors.

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