Let me first just start by saying this:
Now that’s out of the way ‑ because
again I really don’t like writing assignments ‑ let’s move on to the actual task
at hand: discussing the Mod 1 report.
So when we first drafted for our Mod 1 report, me and my lab
partner, Alex, started (quite) early to write our “Background and Motivation”
section. It took us quite some time to figure out what to write. Though we did
have some sort of idea on what to put in our introductory section, it was hard
in the beginning to describe them in a very simple and concise manner. We ended
up having a very rough draft, which we then brought to the BE communication lab
for suggestions. At first, we were thinking of scheduling an appointment with
Maxine, since she would have already some background/idea on how to approach
this assignment; however, due to Maxine’s very early timeslot (which I am very against
to wake up for), we ended up working with David, and I must say that our
discussion went pretty well. Since David has practically zero knowledge on this
project, we had to explain to him what our project is about. He would then read
our introductory statements and see if the idea matches with what we just said.
It really helped us to construct simple paragraphs which can be understood
easily by someone who’s unfamiliar with the field.
A week passed, and we
finally had one more weekend to finish up our report. I and Alex (and the entire 20.109 students) went to the Saturday day-long office hour to work
on our report. Here I and Alex split our workload and focused on each of our own
section. We both worked on separate Results section, where I was in charged in
making the part 1-3 of our results section (part 1 however was just recycling
past homework, so it was not that difficult). The hardest part for me in this
section was on formatting figure for part 2 (which is basically just name of
compounds, their Z-scores and CV). Unlike other groups which had only 5-10 hits,
maybe 20 tops, our team had a ridiculous ~330 hits. This, of course, would be
impossible to be represented by just simple table or graph. We obviously couldn’t
show all of these hits even if we wanted to, and I had a trouble figuring out
the best way to represent the data in a very neat way. After hours of pondering
to myself (while googling for past journals, and playing facebook to help
ease up the mind. Also, pizza helped us well. Thanks Leslie!), I came up with what
I felt was the most optimal solution: a Z-score distribution. Sadly, however,
Ms. Excel doesn’t have an easy and fast button to set up the histogram the way I
like it to be, so I spent another hour just to format this figure, great, but
once the figure was done, everything else that comes after (eg. the actual
discussion) came naturally because the figure itself captured the entire
essence of that result section, and writing of that was not too difficult.
I then continued by writing the Implications and Future work
section. Surprisingly, I found this part to be very easy, as in I didn’t have
to think real hard on what to write, and that’s very rare for someone like me. I
finished the entire page in less than an hour, and was really content with what
I wrote.
Alex and I then met again the next day to finally write our
abstract and title. This again was not that difficult, I think, since all of
our ideas have been well-established. Then again, Alex did most of this part
(so it was really not that difficult for me), and I just added up a few things
that I think was necessary to tie everything together, from the start to
finish.
Looking back, I think the hardest part of this assignment
was just my own inadequacy in English. Having to
express your idea very scientifically in a second language was definitely
challenging, and I have always been absolutely terrified whenever I have an English writing assignment. But still, if I had to choose something else other than English,
the hardest part of the major assignments was to actually come up with a
specific narrative for the report. This project can definitely be written in
hundreds of different ways (probably an exaggeration, but you get the idea),
and to pick one amongst many great story plots was certainly hard to do (this includes
how and which data you would represent. eg. the Z-score distribution would now seem like an obvious choice for my case, but having no experience on science writing whatsoever, it took me a couple hours just to figure it out).
I found a number of great ways to
tackle this problem. First and foremost, pay attention to the 20.109 lecture
during class and lab hour. I felt one thing that really helped me craft my story
was listening to Prof. Kohler’s (very enthusiastic) lecture on the field.
Coming up with this module, she, and other course instructors, of course had
some sort of expectation to how the project (and consequently report) is going
to be, and just picking up this ‘sprinkle of magic dust’ would definitely help
with your mod 1 report. You may also want to reach out to your course
instructors, lab partner, or BE communication lab fellow. Tell them your
thoughts and listen to what they have to say; they might have some exciting or fresh
new ideas that you can incorporate to your story. Also, assignments leading up
to the major assignments were especially helpful for the summary report and mini ppt,
so if there’s anything that the 20.109 instructors need to keep for future classes,
it’s definitely that! (I’m also partly saying so that future students get to suffer through the sheer amount of assignments that I had been and still will be
going through L ).
Once you have that clear picture of your report, I feel that everything
following was not that hard to execute. In that sense, I would probably approach the
Mod 2 report the same way. I would first like to think of a story as a whole,
write the intro, methods, results and discussions accordingly and logically and
fill in any gaps to my story as necessary.
Happy Spring Break!
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