Thoughts from an unexperienced "scientist"

Hi guys!

So here are some thoughts on all the experiments/hard work we did on Mod1 (but let’s be honest most of the hard work was done by the instructors so thank you guys!)

I really enjoyed being eased into the world of Bioengineering lab with the CometChip assay. Here I was, a barely third-year student, thinking I knew something about Bioeng lab because I had UROPed in a bio lab for the past two years. Reality check: I didn’t. It was amazing to learn that part of bioengineering is coming up with these amazing technologies that we use everyday now in other research, and these things happen on our very own campus. The CometChip assay seems like such a simple thing now that we have it, but no one thought to take a spin on the very traditional comet assay until the Engelward lab did it.

Before I was in 20.109, people told me that science was harder than anything else and that most of your experiments would not work. I didn’t believe them. Little did I know that this was going to happen to me. In the cell loading/doubling time experiment, we ended up loading WAY to few cells, so few that we got negative doubling times for some of our conditions. In addition, while trying to graph the data for the cell loading, we got such noisy results that our confidence intervals for number of cells extended into the negatives. All in all, we were getting a lot of negative numbers, and these made no sense biologically.

Anyway, after being amazed at all the things we were able to do, and kind of annoyed at our data, it was time for the hard part: writing up this Data Summary.

Now let me start by saying that I haven’t written anything like this before. The closest I’ve come is high school lab reports, and that was like 3 years ago. Honestly, for a couple of days, Yvi, my lab partner, and I stared at blank pages of our Google presentation and had no idea what to write. Yeah, we had some parts that we’d done for the Homework but these were not in the shape we wanted them to be for our Data Summary. Finally, about 3 days later, we had our figures mostly done, confidence intervals and all, and internally celebrated when we even had some significant differences in our H₂O₂ vs. MMS experiment.

We started writing and once this happened, it all kind of flowed from there. Yvi and I looked at each other at one point and we marveled at how our pages finally started to look full of information, rather than the blank pages that reminded us of our failure to come up with conclusions. 

Frustrations and all, it has been a great Mod1. Looking forward to the rest of the semester!!!