Am I still alive??

Disclaimer: although I got pretty close, no all-nighters were pulled in the making of my report.

I think I wrote so much for the report that I never want to see my keyboard again. But in typical 109 fashion, the writing is never done!!! Yay for blog posts and further procrastinating my studying for 7.05…

Anyway, I started this report as early as I possibly could, and still somehow managed to work on it until 7 pm on the due date...not really sure how that happened, but I think a lot of that comes from the fact that I never really feel like I'm done with writing. Plus, this report was literally never ending- I've never written a paper this long before, much less a paper about science that I wasn't totally sure even connected until about halfway through writing. I think the most difficult part of this report for me was actually connecting all the experiments in this module...to be completely honest I didn’t really understand why the RNA-seq and cell viability data were connected until really late in this process. I understood how each experiment worked as we went through Mod 2, but for some reason that didn’t really translate to a full understanding of the project as a whole, and this made it difficult for me to finish the paper.

I started out with the intro and methods, because I understood the larger motivating questions for this module and the physical experiments we did, but moving into results definitely had a pretty big activation energy. Then when it came time to write the discussion, I felt like I was just repeating myself, and had to totally backtrack what I was writing after feedback from the instructors on what a discussion should actually include. I finished out with title and abstract, but I think I was barely breathing at that point so it was kind of a blur (maybe I should graph coherence of language with sleep deprivation for our independent Mod 3 project??). Last blog post, I made a joke about spending more time in office hours than sleeping in preparation for my presentation, but this week I think that was actually true.

That being said, I realized how amazing all my fellow 109ers are during the endless office hours we spent in building 56. I laughed along with everyone when we talked about all sharing a variation of the same title, ate snacks when we were all too hungry to function, and talked about papers we found as useful references. So at least through all my sleep deprivation, stress, and lack of hope for ever finishing, I was able to have a little fun with some cool people. And thankfully, I got it all in under 14 pages, because as Noreen said “Nothing over 14 pages could be that compelling,” and I didn't want to take her up on that challenge.

Thanks so much to all the instructors for your help throughout this process. Even though it was sometimes painful, I think it was cool to be able to say that I’ve written a paper-esque report for a class- it has definitely taught me a lot about what it will mean if I choose to pursue more research after graduation.