I now know what I am doing

I would say this is about what I looked like in most of my time in lab up until Mod 1. I did a good amount of research in high school, but on the other hand when I did this research I had not even taken AP biology yet. I feel like I had a pretty decent grasp on a lot of the large scale concepts, but as for specifics I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Why was I adding this weird smelling liquid... idk, I knew those columns give me my protein using magic or the force or something like that, and I knew that BCA assays gave me concentration by basically ummmm errrrr uhhhh idk yet again. I had no idea what exactly was going on.

This extrapolated to paper writing as well. When I was writing my paper in high school I started off writing a draft, I would then give it to my PI they would look it over, they would then give it back to me with things that I should change, and then I would change them. Do I know why I made these changes, yes I do, because they told me to. In all honesty though I had very little idea why my PI or post-doc would tell me to make the changes that I did, but I would and the paper came out great. I think given the amount of time I had to write the paper, the method made sense, but looking back I didn't really learn how to do any scientific writing, and that's not very useful as far as going forward in my career.

Mod1 did an awesome job of making sure I did not add one liquid to another without knowing exactly what it was that I was mixing, why I was mixing, how long it would take to mix, where it was made, who made, how it was made, its molecular make up, its dogs name, its best friends address, and its social security number. At first I was a little annoyed because I was so used to just putting things together and interpreting the results, but I now can say after Mod1 I am far more confident in what I am doing not only in 20.109 but in my UROP and other classes (shout out to 7.05). I definitely can say that it not only taught me what specific materials were, but how important it was for me to know exactly what it was that I was doing when I do it. 

Again this also extrapolated to paper writing. I had never had to truly from beginning to end write a scientific paper. Though the data summary for Mod1 was more bullet point like than most scientific papers, it gave me a great outline for what I need to be thinking about when I write my own papers. The idea of hour glass structure, individual subsections for simplicity, simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, were all things that I did not consciously think of when I was reading a paper someone else had written. I think it made for a great learning experience, and though I feel like I have a long way to go as far as writing papers to a publishable level, I feel like I definitely grew a lot in Mod1.