BE 20.109(F20) Class blog

Where do I begin? Is it the condensing the naturally dense paper into a 10 minute presentation? Is it the nerves associated with doing a presentation of this nature? Is it my natural aversion to public speaking given my stutter? Is it recently recovering from illness? Well .... it's everything, and that's ok. I lay out the challenges of doing my journal club presentation but decide to forget the things I have learnt from it. I learnt deeply about the paper I was reporting on, because to know what is important enough to leave out, you must know everything there is to know. I got the opportunity to learn about the topics in the paper, as well as the opportunity to bring the knowledge I have gained to my fellow classmates and instructors. So, that was ok, I guess. But in reality, it was really exhausting and a bit of a harrowing experience. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have done it and faced one of my fears. Although I don't think I did particularly well, it was a huge feelin...

     EverytimeIgetnervousitendtospeakamileaminute. BREATHE. Again. Every. Time. I. get. Nervous. I. speak. a. mile. a. minute. I naturally speak quickly, so when I get nervous, people basically can't understand me at all. This may because I come from New York and we naturally speak very quickly. It could also be because I speak Dominican Spanish, which is notorious for being incomprehensible because we speak so quickly. A trick I learned was to act as though after every word, there is a period. This makes you slow down to an understandable speed. I bring this up because we had Journal Club presentations this week, a public (is Zoom public? I mean you are alone physically, and yet you are talking to others...) presentation. Something you could get nervous about, something you have to be comprehensible in, or else no one understands your paper. The whole point is you want to speak about the amazing findings, and if no one can understand you, that kinda defeats the point......

by Tiwa Aina Preparing for my journal club presentation had three main parts: reading the paper in all of its denseness, understanding the researchers' results and their significance, and distilling this knowledge into a digestible form. Cutting through the jargon was really difficult, especially when the authors insisted on using terminology that an “intelligent but uninitiated” reader would not be acquainted with. For instance, in X, the paper I presented, they mentioned that used the SpyTag/SpyCatcher system to couple the VLP and the CIDRα1 protein. Then, they repeatedly gave measurements for catCIDRα1 and the CIDRα1cat. This was incomprehensible to me and caused me to read entire sections of the paper over and over until I came to a realization: a peptide can be attached from both sides, and the “cat” meant that the VLP held the “Catcher” side of the SpyCatcher system. This was critical information that needed to be clear to the reader for her to understand the results, and so ...

 While words usually gush out of my mouth like an unrestrained waterfall, somehow whenever I am put on a stage the tap seems to run dry. My throat starts to close up, my stomach shrinks, and somehow all of the preparation I did jumps out the window. Giving presentations is a life skill that's really important and relevant no matter what field I end up in, so I appreciate the opportunity to practice, but that doesn't quite erase the anxiety induced at just the mention of powerpoints.  However, the most difficult part of the journal presentation was actually crafting a cohesive storyline from a quite disjointed article. As if speaking smoothly wasn't already an issue, I was required to formulate a scientific story from something that wasn't quite intuitive. Taking note of bullet points to cover in a put-together manner was difficult, but I think I succeeded this time. Deep breaths in and out, in and out, in and out barely helped to calm my roiling stomach before the prese...

    In the speaker notes of the first slide, I wrote in all caps, "Don't stress." I had realized, in the hour between finalizing my slides and presenting, that I hadn't given myself the bullet points on the slides to guide myself. I had taken the "as little text as possible" perhaps too seriously. I knew the goal of each slide--which I had helpfully crafted in a sentence--but it felt different to figure out the words to say. My appointment with the Comm Lab had helped me recraft the presentation to flow better and follow less tangential storyline, but I struggled with the advice to write bullet points instead of memorizing full sentences. With sentences, I felt more secure in the flow of my presentation. But she was right; bullet points would be much more manageable and helpful, and less of a burden to remember.      I spent those sixty minutes of preparation thinking about transitions instead, the core of my flow, and what I needed to say there. I wan...

 There is nothing in this world that makes me more conscious than looking at the clock tick away, hence I usually choose to not look at the clock and not follow the time and rather let my life flow the way it wants to go. Hence, timed assignments which especially try to restrict you from going over which is known to be typical are my enemies, and so was the journal club presentation. While preparing for the JC, I knew that I had to be done in just 10 minutes, and still adopted my previous style of first filing the presentation with how much ever I wanted to talk about, thinking that I would shorten it as needed later . When I read the paper, I found that I had so much to talk about; it was a beautiful and systematic study, and I wanted the entire audience to be able to appreciate the entirety of its content which was obviously a lot. My innate nature won, and I did keep almost the full paper in my presentation, though before I was going to submit I still thought that I had omitted ...

I often dreaded giving presentations in high school. I would practice gesturing and altering my intonation in front of anyone who would listen, at times resorting to my weary mirror. It was always helpful to refer to my listeners' facial expressions and body language, which gave me cues about when to insert pauses or take questions. With time, I’ve grown more comfortable with giving presentations, although it can still be difficult.   In Module 2 of 20.109, I was particularly nervous about answering questions related to my selected journal article. I felt as though preparing slides and explanations for figures was a clear enough process, but that taking questions was much less predictable. Before presenting, I found it helpful to question every step the researchers took in their paper to build a strong logical understanding. I also mapped out the methods section for better visualization. After my actual presentation, I was pleasantly surprised by my experience answering questio...

In a virtual environment, Zoom speaker view is our stage. In past oral presentations, I stressed over eye contact, not talking to fast, and making sure I rehearsed enough to feel confident. And while all these worries persisted, this presentation included an added complexity: the Zoom stage. What does your audience see? Much of my presentation was created with my audience's point of view in mind. Where was I on their Zoom screen? Were my slides eye catching? Was I moving my pointer enough to engage the audience in my slides? Were they even listening, with their cameras off? And the scariest question of all: will my wifi cut out in the middle? There were so many little things to think about.  However, constantly asking myself, "Is this clear to my audience?" translated well from visual display to scientific content. I  kept asking myself if my audience, who may have little to no knowledge on the paper, would understand the information I was presenting. I found this incredi...

So presenting is hard as ever... and I feel like there are countless angles to take to present a 10-page paper. So many angles and so little time. The most surprising part of preparing the presentation was knowing that some content within the article somewhat contradicted itself and I was really invested in trying figure out a way to articulate these slight nuances in the article, while also not taking forever to try and make a point. And that was definitely hard! But for some reason, when it's your time to speak and you get up on that stage... you forget the words you're supposed to say! And you see yourself as a critic in a sea of audience members, slowly deducting points for every stumble you make in your presentation. Mark mark mark as the red pen slides across this imaginary paper, and you feel your grade sinking as if it was your soul and very essence leaving your body. You collapse on the stage, compressed under the weight of your own stress.   You need to breathe! Y...

    It's very easy to verify that a presentation was good. Making a good presentation on the other hand, is much much harder. Personally, I'm a very closed person, and I prefer to hide behind mounds of data, figures, and statistics as opposed to trimming it down to a digestible pill that the audience can ingest. Moreover, this process of trimming necessarily loses some information, and finding the cutoff boundary between excessive data and insufficient detail is both subjective and highly variable over the audience and the data itself.      The journal club presentation in particular presented additional challenges. Not only was the presentation under a strict time limit, but the presentation itself was on research that I hadn't done, or really even considered prior to the project. Trimming one's own data is hard enough, but lopping off large sections of what an author clearly felt was important enough to include in their publication? It's really easy...

     At the beginning of 6.UAT last semester, we had a few presenting tips repeated to us over and over. "Make eye contact." "Use gestures to engage your audience" "Don't be stiff, but don't rock back and forth either." By the end of UAT, most of us were delivering presentations not to a room full of high school students, but to a 15-inch laptop screen. The teaching staff adapted gracefully, and offered equally useful advice on the etiquette of online presentations; however, the reminders to make camera/eye contact, to keep our torsos in frame, and to make visuals that could be read off of the audience's many-sized computer screens, served as a reminder of just how lame  presenting online is.     I think most people have nerves about presenting in person to begin with. And presenting online is even more awkward. Without being physically with an audience, making eye contact and having in-person discussions, and without being able to use your ful...

If my Comm meeting starts at 11am, do I enter the meeting at 10:59, 11:00, or 11:01? The new question during zoom times. Does MIT time still exist during the zoom era? (asking for a friend…) Luckily my mom started talking to me, so the question was answered for me, 11:02. Zoom meeting with people I don't know, especially when the meeting is about them judging your work, usually causes a lot of anxiety. Yet the second I entered the meeting; I felt my worries float away. It may have been that he seemed like he had such a kind personality, it also didn't hurt that his cat was playing in the background.  Another awkward moment, taking notes. The camera shows you looking down so you could be doing anything. Are you on your phone, sewing, doing anything but paying attention, or are you writing notes? I usually just state that I'm writing notes so that there is no confusion. I've heard of too many friends get scolded for “looking on their phone” when they were just taking note...

by Tiwa Aina 20.109 has been my first foray into conducting practical work in the natural sciences. As a Course 18 without any lab experience, I’ve already had a lot of novel experiences—in terms of both experimentation and scientific communication. The latter presented some unique challenges as I worked towards creating the Data Summary. One thing I found very difficult was managing verbosity. In preparation for the Data Summary, my drafts for each section were pretty robust. I tend to use a lot of words to describe what I want to say, and my sentences can get needlessly complex. In math, sometimes you have to use a lot of words, but as long as they precisely communicate your ideas, people generally don’t mind—most prefer something precise, enlightening, and wordy to something terse but vague! My writing style has naturally evolved to prioritize precision of language, even at the cost of concision. So of course, once we were tasked with adapting this content into a condensed format, I...

When I think of what it means to write, I envision a kind of artful and expressive manner of communication - the kind of communication that acts as a screenshot of the writer's mind at the time of writing. This kind of writing normally flows really well, isn't devoid of emotion, and may or may not be opinionated. And even if it isn't opinionated, there is usually a distinct hint of personality weaved into the writing. This is the case for the majority of writing that I have done up to this point in my life.  So for me the main issue then was coming out of that frame and resisting the urge to write "creatively", which for me, consists in large part, of saying more than needed. I tend to be verbose in my writing, and my writing also tends to be a lot more free-flowing than what is expected in scientific communication. I use anecdotes, similes, and analogies to connect disparate ideas. The majority of the difficulty I faced was in maintaining the discipline to say o...

      Scientific writing for me is a whirlwind. To transition from a largely superfluous, colorful, and quite honestly indirect to a clear, concise, and simple writing style is a more difficult task than it seems. Quite often I find myself scrounging for the right word to explain my thoughts, while it sits serenely at the tip of my tongue with none of the urgency I feel exuding from my pores. It's quite difficult for scientific writing to be a favorite when my mind is utterly exhausted, constantly chasing precise words to no avail, while I crumble under the weight of all of the letters I have strewn together in hopes of even glancing at the idea I was attempting to express.      The homework for this module truly brought into perspective the extent of my longstanding troubles with "getting to the point." At first, I didn't realize the extra time it took for each homework assignment to reread and edit my work to craft a true scientific response, but now I am...

Grappling with scientific writing was quite the challenge. I typically love to embellish my essays and revel in every little detail, so working to cut that out was different, to be sure. Nevertheless, eventually I felt comfortable enough to write the summary in a way I felt good about. I figured, after having worked through the rest of the data summary, the abstract would follow logically. After all, I’d delved into excruciating depth for each portion, so I definitely knew enough to write the abstract, right? Well, therein lies the issue. My first go at the abstract was horribly detailed, truly an essay in itself. Clearly, that wouldn’t do. I tried again, attempting to strip the abstract down to its bare essentials. After having worked on one project for so long though, my definition of ‘bare essentials’ was a tad skewed. Needless to say, it was still longer than ideal. I then resolved to just look to other papers for inspiration, after all, they’d had plenty of experience writing abst...

Creative writing and/or writing for fun is certainly different than science writing! I think I'm used to essays flowing smooth as silk, waves on sand, gel pens on paper, brushes on canvas, but this assignment seemed to try and combine many rigid elements into a greater idea. Like ligating the sticky ends of DNA fragments... or something like that.  The process of revising, editing, and iterating is all the same! The hardest part for this assignment was in the end trying to craft a message that really expressed why the reader should care! Not what the focus of our project is, but more, now that everything is said is done, and we have results, data-driven conclusions and figures, why should anyone care? What did we accomplish? Any breakthroughs? Did we push the envelope of knowledge in our field, and does it have any relevance to readers outside of that field? I guess I spent most of my thought and work into figuring out how to frame the broader implications of our research. ...

The hardest part of scientific communication for me is figuring out exactly how I want to word things. For more structured outlines, I'm wholly dependent on outlines as scaffolds for my ideas. I always have ten thousand considerations racing in my mind, constantly ruminating on which phrases to include and what the perfect word for a concept is. It's less sentences and more fragments, which is amazing for outlines. I can build off of these blocks and find the right bit of logic to use in each place. But when I construct a sentence, when I polish that meaning, I find myself second-guessing each word and trying to make the structure more fluid. The tricky thing about scientific communication is that there's always a more concise, more purposeful way to elucidate your rationale. The data summary is about learning how to write in this way, but I don't know the jargon. I can reiterate the lectures and understand the purpose of our experiments, but when positioned as the auth...

 The hardest part of scientific writing for me is balancing concise phrasing with descriptive explanations. This module helped me realize how defining a research problem well can make it much easier to separate meaningful facts and analyses from less significant ones.  During the module, I learned how to create a logical flow toward a hypothesis and experimental design from background information. I was able to consider the numerous factors involved in DNA damage while ultimately forming a cohesive narrative that can be shared with other scientists. Initially, it was challenging to select the most meaningful background research to explain the purpose of our experiments. It was also difficult to select the most meaninful data analyses and conclusions, but referring back to the gaps identified in our background and motivations section was crucial. Although each research project differs in its content, I have recognized the value of identifying existing research gaps that motivat...

  The hardest part of scientific writing for me is… In going through Module 1, I really appreciated the constant reintroduction of the purpose of the module. My past laboratory experience is primarily from UROPing, and at times I felt as though I just went through the motions. However, in Module 1, between the lectures and the prelabs, the purpose of the experiment was constantly being reintroduced, and I appreciated the constant reminder to zoom out and see the bigger picture, rather than solely hone in on the individual labs.  This big picture vision helped me approach the data summary with a general idea of how it should be organized, however, I still had a hard time connecting together all the different elements. I appreciated that the large task was broken into chunks and each of the sections was done over time. However, because of the spacing, I forgot what I wrote for some previous sections and feel as though I was redundant in many of the sections. I noticed this th...

Whenever I think about an experiment or an idea in biology, my brain takes 15 different paths at the same time. It thinks about every aspect simultaneously, may it be the experimental procedure, possible caveats, hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, what I could gain if the experiment fails and if it succeeds, how might I modify the experiment to give me new directions in the future, what other experiments can be performed using this, some new fundamental principle in biology would I be able to discover or refute, which core biological entities are involved in the experiment and which ones can I not say for sure yet that they do affect my results, how can I extract the maximum information from whatever results I get, what are the maximum correlations I can make… After all these thoughts, two things that become readily apparent to me are that my mind will explode if I think more, and that this swirl of thoughts cannot be understood to anyone other than me. So my mind forgets all that it ...

Everyone will contribute four reflective blog posts during the semester and the grade will be part of the participation score. The due dates for the posts are listed on the Schedule and Assignment tabs of the course wiki. Because this blog is visible by all current and former members of the 20.109 community your comments should be respectful and thoughtful. Though you can be controversial, you should not be rude or insulting. Your digital comments will also persist long past the time you're in this class so please don't make any comments that could be misconstrued or misinterpreted in the future. Things you can’t do Publish MIT's logo since that might be construed as MIT endorsement of your views Publish photographs with people’s names tagged Publish rude or malicious comments/statements Plagiarize a blog post from a past semester -- be creative and use your own experiences! Thank you for adding to the community by documenting your experiences in thi...