Talk about Journal Club


The first rule of journal club: don’t talk about journal club. Actually, that seems to be the last rule of a successful journal club. If there is one thing I learned these past couple weeks, it is that one of the key elements of journal club is talking about it- specifically by practicing it over and over.
After mod 1, I think one of the most important take aways for me was the fact that a paper had to flow naturall as a story, albeit with some more technical language. This idea was reinforced heavily in the journal club presentations. When you are writing your own paper, it’s really easy to assume that everyone knows what you’re talking about and will be able to understand your figures just because you do. But as I found out after reading my article the first time, and the second time, and the third time and even the fourth time after that… that definitely isn’t true. If you can’t understand it, read, read it again- that motto rang more true than ever as I prepared for journal club. It was advice I had received from past 109ers and current teaching staff alike, and it became clear that reading (and re-reading) my paper was going to be the key to my preparation. And almost like magic, it seemed that every time I read the paper, I began to understand the story itself, not just the terminology used.

Even after reading the paper multiple times, I think one of the most challenging parts for me was actually understanding all of the methods despite understanding the main message of various figure panels. I guess in that sense, everything we had learned about take away messages from figures and captions rang very true: even without really understanding at first how they obtained the data, I was still able to clearly see why it was important to the article.
Hopefully, as time goes on, I’ll be able to understand scientific articles to the same depth but without having to read it as many times- though I’m sure that time is pretty far down the line!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great way to end the semester

I wasn’t quite sure how much to trust the teaching staff when they said our class was going to get a lot better after the research article, but it actually did. This final module was a lot of fun. As an undergrad, most of my experience with science comes from going to classes in large lecture halls or performing the same experiment over and over again for my UROP supervisor. Coming up with a novel bioengineering idea from scratch was very different from most class assignments and helped remind me why I chose this major in the first place (definitely a necessary reminder while struggling through 20.320 and questioning my life choices). The research proposal was still a lot of work, but the work involved reading research articles about a topic I was interested in and brainstorming with my lab partner. 20.109 has been a really wonderful class (probably my favorite technical class I’ve taken at MIT). The instructors and TAs were amazing, and I think that the things I lear...
Read more

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

Gearing up for grad school

As I walked out of the classroom after the Mod3 research proposal presentation I felt a massive sense of relief and pride. The last major assignment of 20.109 was over – I had done it! The road had been far from smooth – the mod2 report had been a towering mountain that I still can’t believe I was able to scale. The mod3 presentation had been an intimidating concept – it was definitely overwhelming at first to have to narrow down literally all of biology and select a single topic of interest. However, once my group and I had an idea we were able to have a great time discussing and fleshing out the concept. Do I think it was the greatest idea for a research project ever? Probably not, but I think it was much better than I could have come up with before starting 109. Although it was hard to find enough time to dedicate to the proposal and to sleep with a busy final week for all my classes, I’m proud of myself and my team for the work that we put in and the resulting p...
Read more