Deadlines are.. fun(?)

I walked into 20.109 with no expectations, other than the fact that I expected biology.. and engineering.

However, our instructors told us of some scary stories that upperclassmen may have lead us to expect: looming deadlines, a flood of work, difficult time-consuming assignments.. all things I had not heard. As you can imagine, I left looking sort of like this:

That being said, Module 1 was very, very, very helpful.

I never did research in high school. I had never written serious science writing, or performed lab work knowing behind-the-scenes information about the reagents. Module 1 was an excellent introduction into 'how to do science'. [It also miraculously lined up with a lot of what was happening in biochemistry, which was incredibly convenient]

The biggest struggle was always the deadlines. When assignments are due two days apart, there's work to be done. Methods, figures, captions, more figures, some results.. there's always more science to do! And that science gets significantly harder when you've never really done any of it before.

Forewarned, I was on top of things at first.

I quickly came to understand the stories of the upperclassmen, and things got a bit out of control.

Eventually, I was just riding the roller coaster of deadlines.

[I am Gru, horrified in the back, and our lovely three instructors sit in front]

And yet, I never felt our assignments were purposeless. There was never an extra loop-de-loop, or an rapid drop you didn't expect. Everything was neatly engineered and set up to lead up to the ultimate product: our data summary. 

So when I got back all of my feedback on the assignments I worked so hard on, it was rewarding to see that my work could now be applied somewhere else. The biggest struggle was starting/completing very different types assignments so close to one another. 'How to write your methods' was very quickly followed by 'how to write results', which had all been preceded by 'how to make a figure' and 'how to make a schematic'. All things that didn't technically have to do with one another, but were necessary for the foundation of all papers. It was a go-go-go pace that ultimately made the Data summary much easier.

Going into the data summary my battle with deadlines had sort of faded.

I went from this:

to this:

Fix a few things on the protein purification schematic? I knew how to do that. Write a results section for FKBP12 hits? Yeah, I learned how to do that. Write an abstract? Okay, we didn't do that, but the introduction applies. Check, check, check. Slowly, between my partner and I, everything was done.

If I hadn't been so carefully walked through how to do each of these steps, every assignment would have been a nightmare. The data summary would have been a catastrophe. If there hadn't been a data summary, but instead an actual report, I might've just quit right then and there. But none of those things happened. That's the best part of 20.109 so far. Everything is about purpose, and feedback. For me, the purpose of module 1 was to become acclimated to how science works- it's ins and outs in writing, it's mistakes (not purifying FKBP12.. having faulty FKBP12.. gosh, that FKBP12..), and it's purpose. Thinking about why we cared about FKBP12 or why we cared about every small sub experiment along the way put research into a different perspective for me.

I don't think I would have done so much thinking if it weren't for all the deadlines.

Deadlines aren't so bad.

Onto Module 2...