Ode to the 20.109 Professors

 Writer's block, public enemy number one. I assumed that it was only for authors; little did I know that writing this research article would make me an author and liable to writer's block.

When I first heard of the assignment, I was excited to write the article, but extremely nervous. I tried to start early, but I became paralyzed every time I sat down to write it. What do I write? What goes into the discussion or results section? What's an overreach? The wiki page both eased and exacerbated my fears; the description of each section was super informative but seeing how many pages everything had to be was intimidating. 14 pages. Wow. Rationally 14 pages are not that long, but it feels like a million when you have to sit down and write. Luckily, I remembered from the Comm Lab; the best thing to do was not worry about order and start writing anything. I started with the methods section because we had done most of it in a homework assignment. It helped break me out of my writer’s block. The other really helpful thing was office hours. I went to almost every single office hour.

If you remember one thing from my post, let it be go to office hours. 1. All the professors are super kind and will answer any question you have 2. they answer any question you have 3. they can help look over anything you are stuck on or give tips and tricks for each section 4. it keeps you accountable. Your phone is a siren, and seeing your professor on zoom is equivalent to earplugs. Office hours helped keep me on track and allowed me to ask any question I had. How do I know this sentence is overreaching or if it should go in another section? Instead of just staring into my screen like a deer in headlights, I could just unmute and ask the professors for help.

Basically, this post is an ode to Prof. Lyell, Prof. McClain, Prof. Meyer. As it should be. Thank you so much for answering all my questions and helping me with the research article❤❤

- Giramnah

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When do you stop rewriting?

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
Read more

Abstracting an Abstract

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
Read more

The Art of Science - Module 1

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.   I felt
Read more