As I was beginning to work on this project, I realized that this was the first time that I had written a full-paper paper since my writing about sports class in my freshman fall semester. As I have enjoyed writing but substituted those classes for economics classes recently, I entered this assignment with the excitement of refining those skills. I was also excited to explore the new field of scientific writing, as I had not written any papers on scientific topics before.

I thought that writing a research article was going to take a long time, and I was definitely right. Having written all the sections of my paper and reviewed the majority of them with Maxine by Friday night, I was prepared for a busy Saturday afternoon with a tennis match and low expectations for the number of final edits on my paper. After I discovered that my match was canceled, I ended up going to office hours. I quickly discovered that I had minor improvements to make for most of the sections of my paper, as small additions, more citations, and minor inaccuracies had to be fixed. I came to understand that a research paper can always be refined and changed and that I had to accept my work at a certain point. Realizing that I needed to leave for the ZBT semiformal I was in charge of, I ended up running towards our van and asking the driver to wait to give me time to turn in my research article while I still had Internet access. This was an unusually stressful several minutes, as I am not normally worried by school work.

This assignment definitely helped me realize the importance of the argument to the overall paper. Trying to connect all of the different experiments that we completed as well as establishing the benefits of our research to the field was very challenging. I had presented numerous points in my discussion, so it was an interesting task of tying all these ideas together. While I thought I was able to successfully reach my conclusion and bring everything together in a succinct several sentences for my abstract, I ended up with a title that was definitely a little long (so hopefully that turned out all right). 

Overall, writing the research article made me feel like an actual scientist. While I have felt like I am building up my knowledge base through numerous classes here at MIT, I felt somewhat of a disconnect from my work in the classroom and the research field as a whole. Completing our projects in the lab and actually having to document our experiences made me feel like I was actually working towards scientific improvement. Instead of just knowing more about organic chemistry, thermodynamics, or genetics, I was actually applying my knowledge and seeing what I could do. Despite the difficulty and large amounts of work, I really appreciated completing this assignment.