So much for get-away weekend...



This weekend was meant to be a relaxing weekend away from the stress of MIT...THINK AGAIN. This weekend was instead spent pouring over my research paper. None of the relaxing, all of the editing. At the start of Mod 2 I told myself that I would have the research paper done by the time I left for my little Maine vacation, thinking that it would all be okay. (Narrator: “It would not, in fact, all be okay.”) Turns out, it’s pretty difficult to write a paper with no data! Who knew! The fact that we got our data the Thursday before this was due was a little bit of a rough time. I was actually pretty successful with working on the paper as much as I could but forming the critical parts of the paper, such as the end of the introduction, the discussion and the results section was pretty difficult without any concrete findings.

In the future, I will try and not schedule get-away weekends right before big assignments are due. Or lower my expectations of the relaxation to be had. Or just stop going on get-away weekends all together. May when we graduate...

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