It's Been One Hell of a Ride

It feels really weird to be writing my last blog post of 20.109. I can still remember the first day of lecture when we went through all of the modules and all of the assignments on the syllabus. I was so excited to finally get to Module 3 (a little less excited about all the work that had to be done between those dates), and now we're pretty much done with everything - where does the time go?

Module 3 has been an absolute blast though - thanks in no small part to our amazing professor Angela Belcher. I know it sounds really cheesy to say, but listening to her talk about her life story and her inspiration for her research kind of reignited my passion for biological research. After all, who wouldn't be excited about making batteries from viruses and getting to look at ATOMS under a microscope?

Our batteries actually worked too! It's so cool to see what we did in lab actually get made into a tangible physical product (unlike most of bio research). There are so many cool pictures of the stuff we did in this mod (courtesy of Maxine and Professor Belcher), but I didn't want to overwhelm this blog post with only those.

The last really awesome part of 20.109 was creating our research proposals. I honestly had a lot of fun doing this - it made me feel like an actual researcher for a brief moment of time. It definitely was not easy to find something novel to work on, but after digging deep into the literature, there were so many ideas we had somewhat of a hard time just choosing one. At the end we decided to go with microbubbles and BNCT (both of which are magical combinations of biology and chemistry), and I am now thoroughly convinced that almost every biodelivery problem can be solved microbubbles.

The presentations themselves were part this:

But mostly this:

It was really cool to hear everyone's innovative ideas - I especially liked the ones that used existing biological machinery (for example from viruses or bacteria) to tackle an important issue. After all, evolution has had millions of years to develop this technology, so why compete when you can just co-opt it for your own purposes?

20.109 has overall been such an amazing experience, both in developing as a bioengineer and in just having a lot of fun and learning so many new things. If I could do it all over again, I definitely would. Shoutout to Professors Koehler, Samson, and Belcher as well as Maxine, Noreen, and Leslie for making this one of my most favorite classes at MIT! I think this probably best expresses how I feel about finishing the class at this point:

This is Sid, signing off for the last time - it's been a wild ride and I can't wait to see what the future of Course 20 holds!