Final Thoughts

 With the research proposal presentation over, 20.109 has basically come to an end.

(Well not really, there's still that niggling detail of the mini-report that I have yet to even look at). 

After 3 months of far more writing, speaking, and just general communication, I'm really quite happy to re-enter my shell and hide behind a computer screen. Then again, pretty much everything this semester has been behind a computer screen, which has changed the way communication works along several dimensions. While is there a missing aspect of body language, there's also the nice ability to cloak oneself behind a static picture that becomes one's face to all the outside world (I've been told several times that my duck is more recognizable than I am). Such an occurrence would be exceedingly rare in the pre-COVID world, but this is life now, so we take whatever advantages we can get. 

20.109 is a great class for getting out and learning to communicate in a world increasingly reliant upon fast and accurate data transmission. The frequent deadlines, while annoying at times, do serve their purpose of persuading even the most reluctant person to sit down and start their major assignments early. Even this blog post, which I would never write on my own, is a product of those deadlines. I'm trading off the impending 20.320 final project in exchange for writing this blog post, simply because the 320 final project is 2 pages single spaced and this is only a couple of paragraphs of indeterminate length. I think that probably the biggest things I've learned from 109 is how to make effective figures and captions, which is a skill that is extremely important when you can't always be around to fully explain the important details of complicated data. It says something that the first and only thing I've done so far for the 320 project was create the figures and write captions for them. Getting the motivation to write the other parts, well that's something that will take much much longer for me to come to terms with.

So for final thoughts, I'm sure I'll employ the skills 109 has taught me over the last few months in many different aspects of my life. Most likely this will just be unconscious feelings and instincts that specific verbiage feels wrong or that some figure is just too difficult to comprehend, but it will definitely play a very big role in how I approach communication later in life.

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