Before coming to MIT, my parents would always ask me at the end of every school year whether I had enjoyed my classes overall and how they compared to the previous year. My answer was almost always something along the lines of, “yeah they were good, probably a little better than last year.” When my parents asked me that earlier today, though, my answer was much more interesting.
The truth is, last semester was not great for me. There were parts of 7.03 that were interesting, but overall the class felt very slow and outdated. 6.009 wasn’t terribly difficult, but wasn’t terribly remarkable either. 6.042 was well taught, but the psets made me feel like I was a complete idiot.
It also didn’t help that I was working 30+ hours every week in lab preparing for the iGEM competition. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working on that project - but 30 hours a week was just too much. My dad joked that I was working full time on the project and still managing to take classes on the side. And even when that ended halfway through the semester, I started 6.0002, which was also not one of my favorite classes here. At least I had Chinese class (and hockey, I guess) to keep me going until the end of finals.
This semester has been a pretty dramatic shift for the better. While my Chinese class has gotten a little less entertaining, my other classes have been incredible this semester. There are people who complain that Professor Yaffe talks too fast in 7.05, but I actually preferred it that way - even the most interesting classes are difficult for me to pay attention in if they’re too slow. And for all of the complaining I heard going into the class about the metabolism section, I actually like it a lot. Despite having almost no relevance to life science at all, 6.004 was one of my roommate's (a Course 6-3) favorite classes that he recommended I take this semester. Not only has it been a good contrast to my very life science heavy course load this semester, but the class in general is really cool.
20.109 has been an exceptional experience as a class for me in several ways. When I registered for the class, I was excited primarily because I finally felt like a real Course 20 now that I was taking 20.109, but I hadn’t really put much thought into what the actual content of the class would be like. On the first day of class, however, the professors teaching each of the modules gave us their brief descriptions of the modules. I walked out of that lecture incredibly excited for the semester. Since I’ve already discussed the first two modules in previous blog posts, I’ll talk mostly about module 3 for the rest of this post.
In the first lecture of module 3, what stood out to me most was that Professor Belcher makes no effort to hide the fact that she is extremely excited about the work she does, and her excitement is very contagious. This was the primary reason why I enjoyed going to her lectures so much. While a lot of the lab work for the module, particularly the first two days, was a little slow, I enjoyed very little more than telling people I was making a virus-based battery when they asked what I was doing in 20.109.
As I discussed at length in my first blog post, the most exciting part of research for me is seeing physical evidence that my experiments have worked, so when we looked at our mineralized phage samples on the TEM, I thought that was really cool. Seeing the crystallized gold nanoparticles with the iron phosphate was actually more interesting for me than seeing the actual batteries work, probably because I was just kind of expecting them to work.
The final highlight of module 3 for me, as I expect is the same for everyone, was the research proposal presentations. During the literature review while Colleen and I were deciding on our project idea, I came across several papers that, while I knew I wouldn’t be able to effectively synthesize into a good research proposal, were just incredibly interesting uses of science and reminded me of why I chose Course 20 in the first place - because there are just so many interesting things that happen in the field. It maybe would have been nice to have a little more of a break from working on the assignment after spending so much time the week before we began on the research paper for module 2, but
With regards to our proposal specifically, I felt much more like an actual research scientist as Colleen and I were reading through papers on Alzheimer’s disease not only for results but also for methods - in fact, there were some papers that I read exclusively for the methods section. I think that’s the biggest distinction between reading just for the sake of learning how biology works and reading to learn how to use biology do something useful, with the intention of actually doing it.
I also found that Alzheimer’s disease, and just neuroscience in general, was much cooler than I was expecting - it might be pretty cool to take an actual neuroscience class as an extra elective later on. Too bad I’ve already filled my Courseroad because Course 20 has too many interesting classes already. Is it bad that I’m only a sophomore and already putting off classes until grad school?
I’m really grateful to all of the professors for giving us the opportunity to participate in their research, all of my classmates for coming up with really cool ideas for the research proposals, and, of course, the teaching faculty, for all the time they’ve put in to developing this masterpiece of a course that has been a much needed reminder for me of why I chose Course 20. Thanks for a great semester!
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