Learning how to write science



I really enjoyed Module 1! The topic was very interesting to me and I got to learn new techniques that I can use in the future.

While I definitely gained new technical skills, I think I also greatly improved as a scientific writer. In high school I wrote some lab reports, but I never really appreciated the impact of clear and concise writing. 20.109 taught me that being clear and offering enough details without overwhelming the reader is very important when sharing your findings with the rest of the community.  


At the beginning of the class I struggled creating a meaningful figure for the cell loading experiment with a descriptive enough caption without giving too much detail. After a couple revisions, I was able to significantly improve this figure and apply the feedback to the other figures I created for the data summary.  I still have a hard sometimes finding that balance between detail and conciseness, but I am looking forward to honing my writing skills in the coming modules! Another challenge for me was drawing conclusions from our data when it was not statistically significant. This is something that will for sure come up in my career and it is important to learn how to overcome these situations. It was great being able to reflect on the procedure and examine our data to determine possible reasons as to why our results did not match our hypothesis and expectations.


One amazing resource for me during the writing process was the BE Communication Lab. I made an appointment each time I was having trouble starting up with the homework assignments, and it helped me a lot talking through my thoughts with someone and finding the best way to communicate my thoughts in a clear and effective way. It was also very helpful making an appointment before the data summary was due to have an extra pair of eyes read over our work and get additional feedback on what parts we could further improve. I will for sure keep using this resource during the rest of my time at MIT. :)

Overall I had a lot of fun working on this module and I have gained a lot valuable skills! I am looking forward to the rest of the semester :)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It BE like that sometimes (R)

So Many Figures

The difficult part of technical writing