How Do I Write Science

Every since I started at MIT, I knew I wanted to do some kind of research.  I didn't know how or where, but, somehow, I would be a scientist.  Of course, I had no idea what nay of that would entail, all High School taught me was that Mitochondria was the powerhouse of the cell.  I started out in a weird UROP where I didn't really have much interest in, but did anyway for some easy resume stuffing since helping out teachers and being a good noodle in High School wasn't going to cut it anymore.

In that process I had to read through a lot of papers.  And I mean A LOT of papers.  It's kinda what happens when you have no idea what you're researching but you're still trying to have some faint grasp of what's going on.  Through this I learned two things: scientists can't write, and that it's not their fault.  The amount of information that needs to pass from one person to the next makes it astonishing as to how anything ever gets done in the science world.  Getting from one idea to the next is incredibly difficult without the right audience.

Even so, I always figured I could write a paper myself, one that could knock these papers out of the park.  But I didn't have anything to write about.  Or the knowledge of what needs to be in a paper.  Or even how much information I needed to have to constitute writing a paper.  In fact, I didn't really have any real idea of how to write a paper, I just thought I could do it better.

Then comes 20.109, a truly eye opening experience.  By the time I started the class, I'd already had some lab experience under my belt.  Two UROP's done and one currently underway, you could say I had this science thing down.  Except for any of the literature.  Although I could do the experiments and run everything as I should, I'd still never had to write anything, never had to actually sit down and think about what I was doing or why it made my supervisors happy or sad when they saw the results.

Our first data summary (not even a real fleshed out paper mind you) really shed some light on how much work goes into each and every part of a paper.  It felt like every section could be a standalone assignment, as if someone could sit down and spend hours or days writing a methods section.  Thankfully, 20.109 helped us go through each and every step.  I (and pretty much everyone else in the class) would've been completely lost if the teaching staff had just decided to drop this assignment on us.  I gained a new appreciation for what scientists have to go through each time they try to publish, and now I definitely won't underestimate anything the scientific community does.  It just takes a bit of work, and a look at the other side, to really understand what it means to write a good paper.