Post-20.109 reflections

 by Tiwa Aina

15 hours a week? Total lie. 

I'm not sure I've spent so much time on any class in my entire academic career. But, as I reflect on this, I also realize that I haven't ever had a learning experience so holistic and yet so robust. 20.109 is what I think engineering should look like: deep theory, deep praxis, and special care made to ensure I can communicate the initiatives I pursue as a scientist. (It's especially amazing that this could effectively occur while remote.)

Something that I've noticed is the power of frequent exposure. Before 20.109, I would occasionally pull up a paper to learn about something, and every time I would be overwhelmed with the content. But after having gone through so many papers (closely enough to be able to give presentations on them and answer curveball questions afterwards), I find it so much easier to digest and understand biological research. 

I loved the opportunity to apply the knowledge, approaches, and experimental principles to an initiative of our choice; it was a really appropriate and rewarding culminating assignment for the final module. Something that surprised me when I came to MIT was that people doing UROPs (or even graduate research) aren't necessarily working on the ideas they have to solve problems. (In fact, this is something that makes me unsure about pursuing research in BE postgrad.) So to be able to go through this ideation process for something we're passionate about was very valuable to me; when else would I be able to present a framework and strategy for combatting hypersensitivity and get continued feedback from scientists about experimental strategies, possible challenges, etc. associated with the pursuit?

Now, don't be mistaken; I still don't like giving presentations and I never managed to figure out how to eliminate the nervous vibrato I get even when I know when I'm talking about. I've also heard enough gel horror stories to be wary of doing anything wet lab related. Nevertheless, I've come out of 20.109 with a newfound interest for the biological sciences, even when it's divorced from computation. I hope I get opportunities to use my 20.109 skills/knowledge/experiences in the future!

Thank you 20.109 staff!

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

Writing in Science, for Science, by Science: Takeaways

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
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