Mod1 Thoughts

Oh dear, how does one start a blog post???

Anyways, I really enjoyed Mod1 as a whole because of how new everything was. It was so cool that we were using recent technology developed at MIT (the CometChip assay) and we were learning from the creator herself! It was also interesting seeing how so many sub-experiments could come from utilizing the CometChip. However this did mean that occasionally the sub-experiments felt very un-connected and irrelevant to one another.

Something I really appreciated was the fact that (perhaps because it was a completely new module) the results were unknown. In that regard it felt like what real "science research" would be like--a foray into the unknown with little knowledge of what to expect. Of course this meant that there were some struggles along the way. I sometimes felt like different conditions were chosen somewhat arbitrarily (especially for the cell loading optimization sub-experiment).

Also through this lab I learned that making mistakes is super easy. Like super easy. For example, when we were doing the Coriell cell experiment for genetic variation/BER capacities, we loaded the concentrations of H2O2 in reverse order, necessitating relabeling of the gel. It seemed like relabeling would be an easy fix... but flipping the gel over actually destroyed some of the macrowells so we had very little data for some of the conditions. But for the purposes of this class we could just pretend everything was ok :D

Because of struggles like the one mentioned above (and possibly because the module was so new), a lot of our data wasn't statistically significant. While unfortunate, this again made the module more realistic since success is far from guaranteed in real research.

Overall, I thought Module 1 was a great first module for 20.109. It got me excited that we were using super new technologies and also introduced (or refreshed me) on basic biology lab techniques. Not knowing the results beforehand was a new experience for me in a lab class and lent a sense of realism to the class. Even though the experiments weren't necessary successful 100% of the time, I still feel that I learned a lot. Thank you to all the instructors for a great module!