Mod 3 >> Mod 2

Mod 3 was by far the best module in 20.109. We were able to make batteries using viruses and researched a novel proposal idea. It was also much easier to present with your lab partners instead of alone like in the journal club presentation. These last few days made me feel the most like a bioengineer and I'm looking forward to future lab work in the upcoming semesters.

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

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

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