Roller Coaster Ride

This has been a very interesting year to say the least. To be honest, for me it's ending in quite a bit of burnout. All of my courses are affected, but I think 20.109 in particular bore the brunt of it. Nevertheless, ...

Ok, so at this point it doesn't seem like I will be able to articulate my thoughts before the 10pm deadline, and I am really really tired. So, in case I don't make it back to complete this, I would like to thank all the professors, instructors, and TA's for all their assistance and guidance throughout this very challenging virtual semester of 20.109. In particular, thanks to Professors Meyer and Lyell for their generosity, in terms of their time, patience and care. Thank you, and I hope we get to see each other in person sometime soon!

Happy holidays!

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