Just Keep Swimming

It's been a tough semester. With 22 hours of class a week, 15-20 hours of soccer (Roll Tech!), and approximately 42 billion hours invested in putting together the 2016 MIT iGEM team's project, here's a live look into my life:


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Add in the Mod 1 Data Summary and I was definitely feeling stretched to the limit. There is nothing I procrastinate more than writing assignments – my roommate says she can tell when I have an essay due soon because I suddenly get really chatty. The advantage of being so busy is that I had no other choice than to get started! Setting up meetings with my lab partner was also helpful because it forced me to put aside time to work on the assignment. Being held accountable by another person kept me motivated – I'm all about being a team player.

It was a good thing we started early, because scientific writing is hard. Distilling complicated subjects into clear and concise statements was a challenge, especially since most of our report was written in bullet points. Writing the abstract was particularly tough because every word matters!

Another un-anticipated hurdle was creating figures. At first I was pretty exciting about making them; it certainly beat wrestling with Excel to produce graphs. It turns out that creating clear and informative figures is far, far more difficult than coaxing Excel into spitting out a graph. You have to a) know what you want to convey b) figure out how to visually represent this information c) actually make the figure

About two hours in, this is how I felt:

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But the end result was a pretty sweet figure, if I dare say so myself :)

I invested a lot of time into the Mod1 Data Summary, and at first I worried I might have put a little too much time into it – I kinda put off on work for other classes (oops) – but in the end I think it turned out to be a good decision. It was nice to only have a few revisions to make this weekend as iGEM hit major crunch time. I do wish I had spent more time on the mini-presentation – I felt like I really burnt myself out on the data summary and was a total wreck by the time it came to film which made me feel really disappointed with myself :(

Oh well, onto the next module!

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