Getting an A is hard :'(

After this assignment, I realized how hard is it to get an A in difficult classes.
I spent cumulatively probably 30 hours writing this report because I'm horrible at writing. I always feel like my wording isn't clear and my structures are bad.
I also felt like throughout this assignment I was constantly repeating what I've already said but it was a really frustrating process to try to fix it
I'm also just super exhausted because we're at that point of the semester so everything is a struggle really.
But I'm super glad it's over and I am in a sense proud I put together a 13 page research article showing my knowledge in metabolic metabolism to increase acetate production in E. coli.
I learned quite a bit about CRISPRi and the wet lab protocols to get to our final results.
I really wish I was a better writer/communicator
I always degraded myself and never liked the way I phrased things.
It truly is a remarkable skill to not only be extremely knowledgable about your field in science but also to be able to communicate it well.
Those to me are the real heroes in science
I feel very insignificant compared to them :'(
But I'm slowly crawling and inching my way through the rest of this semester.. 2/3 of the class is done! Final push.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It BE like that sometimes (R)

Image
The hardest part of scientific writing for me is a combination of a lot of different things. Finding the reason for the research that is not too broad (aka, cancer in general), but is also not too specific (glioblastoma, since, while our cells were from glioblastoma, we didn’t directly study this). The implications and future-works section was rough for similar reasons to the background and motivation, but it was slightly easier since it was based off of our own data. Also, compiling information to include in the background and motivation is really rough. I think making the figures and analysis was a little easier, though it was definitely very time consuming. It be like that sometimes I guess. I did enjoy making the figures in MATLAB though! Was a lot of fun for me. Something that really helped our team was making a to-do list of everything that needed to get done. I think this is something I will implement for writing my full research report for Module 2....
Read more

So Many Figures

            When we first chose our journal articles a couple weeks ago I tried to be intentional about picking one that would make a good presentation. I wanted one that I found interesting, and one that would have enough engaging results to fill the full 10 minutes. It was those two criteria that led me to choose the “Directing Cellular Information Flow via CRISPR Signal Conductors”. I found the premise of engineering CRISPR constructs to act at ‘Boolean Logic Gates’ really intriguing, but what I didn’t realize until somewhat later was just how extensive this paper was. Not only did the authors design environment inducible CRISPR sgRNAs they also created three or four variations of this system, tested its responsiveness to a number of different conditions, created six different ‘logic’ gates, and used them to kill cancer cells. In addition to the 6 figures in the paper, there were 36 supplementary figures and 24 supplementary ...
Read more

The difficult part of technical writing

Image
Technical writing is decently intuitive to me because it is typically divided into discrete sections: the abstract, introduction & background, materials & methods, results, and implications & future work. Excluding the abstract, each section logically leads into the next one without the need for elegant transitions, unlike creative writing. I typically like to write the introduction first, as it gives me a good idea of what the general goal of the paper is. It helps me to focus my methods section and the rest of the paper to only include material which is necessary for the goal of the study. I like to write the methods section after, as it reminds me of which experiments were important to the study and thus what data I should include in my results section. When I get to the results section, the introduction and methods have given me a good idea of what figures to make and what data to include. This leads me into writing the implications & fut...
Read more