Keep Calm and Continue the Module

Hello my 20.109 friends!

My first reaction to this blog post assignment was why… 
I understand the purpose of blog posting and it is definitely good to share everyone’s thoughts about the projects but having just figured out that the posts are not anonymous, I am too nervous to start. Being sleep deprived from finishing Mod.1 data summary revision and from studying for 7.06 exam 2, 

I hope I can remember Module 1 well.

First of all, learning the background knowledge during the lectures and having a pre-lab session at the beginning of each lab really helped me connect different sections of our experiment to the overarching goal of this module. The protocols and instructions were given in details and I was able to not make any mistake and to reassure myself that I was following the correct steps. Different experiments we did in the lab and 
doing the tissue culture for the first time, 

I really enjoyed being in the lab.

I guess the struggle hit me with the assignments we had outside of our lab. Writing the lab reports on benchling for each experiment helped me examine what I did and summarize what I got out of each experiment, but it was quiet time consuming. Ideally I should have completed the lab report after each class but that did not happen. I will try to fix that in Module 2.

Assignments for making figures/captions and writing the introduction to results and interpretation/future work sections were very useful in a sense that it helped me a lot to prepare what to expect for the data summary at the end of our Module. However, as mentioned earlier, we didn’t know what to expect as this module was very new and open-ended. Many of the data were either lost or calculated to be insignificant from the t-test that when we do further experiments on the CometChip assay, we definitely need to run the assays in more duplicates. Nonetheless, I found BE Communication Lab workshops to be also very helpful that I now feel a lot more comfortable knowing what each section should look like. 

Overall, I worried a lot about taking this class as my first CI-M, but it was a great start. I admit it took a lot of time to finish assignments with tight deadlines, but I’m learning a lot to think and write as a researcher. Lastly, I just want to say thank you to Prof. Engelward, our instructors, TA and my lab partner for everything they have done for this module J