Biggest Takeaways from 20.10fineeeee Mod 1

Before we dive in, I would just like to say I am writing this in an airport so I feel really hip blogging on the go!

Anyways,  Module 1. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…all relative of course. Jokes aside. I thoroughly enjoyed Module 1 for many reasons. All different, but equally important.

1. Active Time Management

With a constant flow of assignments, one can find themselves swimming upstream in a very strong current.  20.109 teaches you to stay on top of your assignments. If you feel like there is nothing to do, you’re probably doing something wrong.  

On the left is without time management, and on the right is without time management.

Active vs Passive Time management --- It’s one thing to think about the work that needs to be done, and it is another thing to actually do it.  This is the difference between active and passive time management. It is very easy to plan out what you are going to do, but once you have to DO what you planned to do. 20.109 Module 1 was a constant reminder to always maximize my time.

2. 100% Biological Engineering. FDA Approved. (I do not have a citation for this, just trust me)

Many studies have had Course 20 UROPs prior to 20.109. All of my UROP experience thus far has been in Course 9, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (which I have absolutely loved). Module 1 was my first exposure to true biological engineering.  I love learning about different aspects of the field in lecture, and then applying what we just learned in lab an hour later.  Finally, take a look at who we are learning from?! All the professors, instructors, graduate students are all places where us students would like 5, 10, 20 years. Module 1 made we take a look at where I am and where I would like to be at the same time.

3. The Positives of Group Work 

Throughout my academic career, I have always shied away from group work and viewed group work as a negative thing. Usually, there’s always someone who doesn’t pull his or her weight, many times personalities clash, and the list goes on and on.  However, Module 1 has allowed me to see the positives of group work.  All the students in 20.109 (shout out to T/R) have been so great to work and collaborate with. Finally I really have enjoyed working with my lab partner (shout out to Nora), and I  hope all the rest of the 20.109ers are enjoying their lab partner dynamic as well.

The trials of journal club

I remember being taught effective highlighting skills in elementary school: “Find the important ideas,” my teacher advised. “Don’t paint the page.” My child self would absorb this information, then promptly proceed to highlight almost every single sentence--at the time, everything seemed important. “Effective highlighting” is a practice I still struggle with. I harbor a certain fear of skipping over important facts.

Preparing for the journal club presentation forced me to confront this fear. Preparing the slides was more difficult for me than I thought it would be, mainly because I had to whittle my paper down to its most important points. I had to decide which results to focus on and present. This was a highlighter moment, but I was determined not to paint the page this time (read: give a half hour long presentation). Instead, I found that redefining the task in less daunting terms, namely shifting my mindset from “find the most important points” to “tell a concise story” as our 20.109 instructors repeatedly told us, allowed me to better shape my presentation and put my slides together.

Completing my slides only cleared one hurdle, however. The real challenge lay in the execution--in the actual presentation itself. I’ve never enjoyed speaking to an audience of people, and the night before the journal club, I practiced over and over to the point where my roommate nearly kicked me out in frustration.

When I arrived at the room the next day, though, the cozy arrangement of the audience seating with respect to the projector screen made me feel less nervous. Having the presenter location squashed almost into the audience diluted some of the formality of presenting, and stress eating good food (thanks Leslie!) also helped to calm my nerves.

Though I was very nervous while giving my presentation, practicing the night before helped a lot. The last five minutes of presenting went by in a blur; my brain had somewhat melted into auto-pilot mode, and my mouth parroted the words I’d repeated to myself the night before. At the end of the presentation, I was expecting myself to melt into a quivering puddle during questions, but I survived those as well. In the end, the journal presentation was a good exercise in booting me out of my comfort zone, and I appreciate the learning experience.

In Review

What an exciting module 1. Despite reassurances that 'life isn't easy', I was sure everything would go off without a hitch.

Yeah. That's probably me.

Even more exciting was all of the new things I learned to do. Never before had I done a purification or an SDS-PAGE or an assay for protein concentration. I'd hardly been in a lab at all. I feel like I'm finally starting on the path to becoming a bioengineer.


As for the work:

That's me doing the data summary draft.

This is me doing the revision:

And this is me doing the homework for every lab:

That's a man who looks like he knows what he's doing. Despite the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing most of the time, I truly feel determined to try. When the data summary came around, I wasn't dreading it like I thought I would at the beginning of the semester. I had ideas of what to do for most of it, and the things I had no clue about became clearer as I went along (with help).

Being in 7.05 and 20.309 has also been surprisingly helpful. Every few weeks this happens, 

and I learn one concept or procedure in triplicate. All of my classes bring it up at the same time, or even just two of my classes and I get the feeling of deja-vu. It's surprisingly helpful to let something sink in and then be taught about it by a new person in a new way for a different end goal.

I'm excited to do more things I've never done before in 20.109 module 2. And am quite looking forward to some hiccups to learn from or about.

First Things First...

For some reason, the hardest part of any piece of writing for me to write is always the beginning.  Body paragraphs, methods sections, and analysis are all fine, with minor struggles here and there but overall success; however I could stare at a piece of paper for hours trying to figure out an introduction. As an example, it took my about ten minutes to think of an opening sentence for this blog post, and the one that appears in the post will most likely not be what appears in the final draft (Edit: I’ve changed it twice since I wrote that sentence)

Anyway, I don’t know what about the introduction makes it so hard for me but I’ve always found it difficult to complete. I think it could be because I’m trying to convince you to read my paper and that’s kind of a lot of pressure. I’ve put a lot of thought into what the paper is about and getting the results that I’ve found, but if I can’t persuade you in one or two sentences that what I have to say is relevant or interesting it won’t matter, you won’t read it and all the work I’ve put in will go to waste. You're putting yourself out there, in some respect, and that can be hard to do.

In the past, in order to try and expedite the introduction writing process, I’ve written all the other parts first and then used that to write my introduction. It definitely helps writing the middle section of the introduction where you’re supposed to “zoom in” and describe more in depth the motivation behind our experiment.  When it came to the module one report, I made figures and wrote captions first, which was something that I’ve never done before but thoroughly enjoyed learning how to do. I definitely have room to improve but I feel like I’ve gained this skill and will continue to develop it in 20.109. We also wrote part of the methods, which I went to the Communication Lab to work on and got some good tips for the future.

And THEN came the introduction L Cue the scary music. Jaws theme. You know the drill. I went to a Starbucks down the street from my house, got an iced coffee, and told myself that I couldn’t get a refill until I got the job done (which embarrassingly enough is a huge motivator for me). In the past, I’ve written it from the end of the introduction to the beginning, and I tried this tactic again with mild success. It took me a while but I got the job done and submitted a version that I felt comfortable with, but definitely needed work and I looked forward to getting comments on it and improving it for the future.

As it turned out, the parts of my introduction that I had practiced writing more (the middle section) were pretty good, and I got helpful suggestions for the other parts. In the final product for my groups Module 1 Report, we ended up combining all three of ours and using different parts of each, and I’m pretty happy about the contribution that I made and how it turned out in the end. I think in the future, I might go to the Communication Lab to get help with my introduction for Module 2, but other than that if I can just feel less uncomfortable about writing the introduction it will get better. If I don’t hype it up in my head and over-stress about it I think it’ll be less of a struggle to write, and I’m hopeful that for my next report and for the future I’ll be able to complete introductions with ease. 

Finally: A Look Back on Mod 1

When I registered for 20.109, I was excited. I did not fully understand yet just what 109 would entail, but I knew that I enjoyed research projects based on my previous UROP experience, and was excited about getting to try out new things that I did not yet have experience with in my lab. I feel like this might have been an appropriate meme to start the class with:

After sitting through the introduction on day one, my first thought was “FINALLY!” This class sounded like it was going to be the most applicable class to real life that I had ever taken. I feel that up until this point, I’ve been learning subjects that all build on each other in interesting ways, but most of these have only been classes on the theory of biology or engineering. Here was finally a class that would combine both theory and actual application to complete meaningful projects. Throughout Mod 1, I really enjoyed learning skills of protein purification, SMM screens, and science writing.

However, being excited about 109 does not always translate to being successful in all the work that this class requires. My friends can definitely tell you that I have a love-hate relationship with some of the assignments that we’ve had to complete in 109. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that writing assignments are read somewhat subjectively, and so it is difficult for me to ever feel like I’ve really “completed” a 109 assignment. Completing 109 homework is nothing like completing PSETS that have right and wrong answers; although there are definite dos and don’ts of science communication, individual scientists can choose to display the same information in very different ways. Because of this, figuring out the best way to show a collection of data such that it is understandable by most audiences is one of the most difficult things for me personally.

I had already identified some of these weaknesses in my science communication over the past year of writing proposals, making a group meeting presentation, and presenting a poster for my UROP. In trying to display large amounts of data and protocols, I have been challenged to distill it down to the most important pieces for my audience to take away. However, one thing that I think 109 has taught me so far that has made me slightly better at writing is the idea that my science should tell a story. I really love the fact that biology can be formulated into one coherent storyline, and I think this was something that really helped me understand what was important to include in my data summary schematics and figures and in my mini-presentation.

Now that I’ve established that turning my research into a story is a great way for me to narrow down my focus and form a coherent report/presentation, I can hopefully take this into Mod 2 with me and use this strategy (and lots of office hours, of course) to help me write an effective research article. 

Drafting the Data Summary Was Hard, but It Was a Heck of a Rush

Was writing the Mod 1 report easy? No, not at first.

Did I learn something? Oh yeah, I hate writing the results section. But thanks to my partner, it became easier.

When we were given details about the data summary for Mod 1, my lab partner, Alexis, and I started gathering together details for our report. Early on, we agreed on which topics we would take on. I would take on the SMM background and results (Z-scores and chemical structures) of the report, and Alexis would take on introducing FKBP12 and the discussion/future implications.

Although we settled on this early on, I didn’t think it would be hard to construct the pieces of data for the Z-scores, and I wanted to seem self-sufficient on my sections for writing.

When drafting the background and motivation section for SMMs, I found regurgitating information in a clear manner very straightforward to me. Even piecing together my story helped in conjunction with myBut, when writing the results section for our 6 hits for FKBP12, I was stumped. To me, writing the methods or even the background to SMMs both weren’t as hard as explaining why all of our structures had high affinity for binding. I was still stumped after assembling all the figures needed for our report. Maybe it was because I didn’t understand chemical structures as well or because I took 5.12 a year ago. Anyways, it was the middle of M1D7’s lab section, and Alexis and I both hit a standstill on crafting our Mod 1 report.

Because I was a little hungry (and turns out he was, too), I asked Alexis if he wanted to walk with me to grab a Twix bar. As we left 56-302, we went on a walk to discuss a bit of our data and to go get food. During that 10 minute walk, our conversation was mostly about the structural similarities between our binders. Ironically, when walking, we looked at our binders’ structures on our phones (we took pictures of them) and found that all of them had very strong nucleophiles. We then discussed particular assays that we could do, and decided what questions we should ask to analyze how the structures bind with FKBP12 with such high affinity.

After this conversation, it became a lot easier to write each of our own individual sections. I’m almost certain that was probably one of the most scientific conversations I’ve had with anyone thus far.

While the hardest part of writing the data summary was the results section for me, I’ll be sure to work on it more for our Mod 2 Report, and also ask Alexis or the 20.109 staff (Thanks to Leslie and Noreen’s massive 20.109 Saturday OH party :D) for help piecing the results together.

On Firsts

As I sat down to write the first blog post of the first module of my first course 20 lab class, I began to appreciate how much I really learned in this past month and a half. It really has been a module of firsts. Nearly all of the experimental methods were new to me, except for dilutions and measuring fluorescence intensity. It was fascinating to learn about and carry out protein purification, SDS-PAGE, and the small molecule microarray assay. And afterwards, looking at our top hits and their molecular structures and actually seeing similarities between them was really exciting! It combined theory with proof.

In 7.05 we had started the year off by learning about SDS-PAGE and protein purification methods: affinity columns, ion exchange columns, and gel filtration chromatography. These were all methods that I was learning about for the first time. So when we ended up using the Ni-NTA column to purify our elusive FKBP12, and gauging our success with an SDS-PAGE gel, I was really excited to be using the concepts from 7.05 in action! I might be confused most of the time in biochem, but I can answer an SDS-PAGE gel question!

But of course, after all the fun experiments were done, we had to go on to the hard part: writing up the experiment and results as a concise narrative for the data summary. Writing does not usually come naturally to me, and I realized through the homework assignments that technical writing is especially hard. Thankfully my lab partner, Vivian, is the real MVP and helped me/ taught me a lot, such as by changing my SNR distribution graph legend's title from "Top hits that followed trendline" to "Correctly identified top hits." Improving my technical writing will take a lot of practice, so I'm grateful for the copious notes from Leslie and Noreen on our homework assignments on how to improve.

I have also learned that I enjoy making schematics. Admittedly, my first schematic was terribly redundant, but I think that, with Leslie’s comments, I’m starting to get a hang of it. This turned out to be a helpful skill when my urop supervisor asked me to make a schematic for one of our experimental methods for a patent proposal.

Now, on to seeing whether compound 401 and olaparib can selectively eliminate cancer cells!

Why is starting the hardest part?

The hardest part of any writing assignment for me is just knowing where to start. You have to commit to a main point and trust that you will be able to follow through with it. For me, writing the abstract was a painful process because I had to organize all of my ideas and decide how I wanted the data summary to flow and progress through the work we did in module 1. Throughout module 1, however, I have become more comfortable with just writing something down and then learning to evaluate it. Once there are ideas on a page, it is significantly easier to revise them to sound the way you intend. I think one of the key factors for me learning to pick out what is right and wrong in different parts of scientific writing has been the communication workshops with Diana. I really enjoyed the interactive nature of these workshops. In particular, working with my lab partner to evaluate an abstract or figure from a published paper taught me many important things. First, it was great to get experience working together as we learned proper writing and presentation techniques because then we started our work on the data summary on the same page. Additionally, comparing how each group decided to revise the given writing sample showed me how many different ways you can approach a problem in scientific writing and still end up with a good result. Finally, it was helpful to see common mistakes that are made in papers to know what to avoid in our data summary. 

Once the abstract was written, I found that the rest of the data summary was fairly straightforward until implications and future work. For the most part, in class and through homework assignments we had already worked with our data to make figures and evaluated our results. It was then easier to write out these thoughts clearly because we had already received feedback on many of them. Implications and future work  was difficult because we had to be careful not to go too big with our future work section. Realistically, we can not jump from doing a single SMM screen to curing Alzheimers but it is nevertheless tempting to say something along those lines in future work. This was one of the biggest conceptual things my partner and I had to fix in our data summary revisions. Ultimately, the data summary really helped me understand some of the key objectives and qualities of good scientific writing. I look forward to using this as we move through module 2 and will hopefully struggle less with our next big assignment!

Putting the 'MINI' in 'Presentation'

Anyone who has ever met me knows I like to talk… alot. As a person of many, many, many words, I have struggled over the years with how to deliver a point in a concise, effective manner. So, when I saw the word “mini” in front of “presentation,” I got a little nervous for the second assignment of module 1. A short elevator pitch was not something I frequented often.   
To approach the assignment, I evaluated every part of our data summary and decided what points were most important to tell a logical, interesting story. I struggled most with the background/ motivation and results section of the presentation because I thought there was a lot of very relevant information that I would try to pack in to the short 3 minutes. However, for the introduction of the presentation, I decided to focus on chemical probes as an important mechanism for understanding more about “undruggable” proteins. Honestly, I thought this would be incredibly attention-grabbing because everyone likes the idea of discovering more drugs to help people in pain. For the results part, I focused on the azaindole core since the result were consistent across the class. I thought the audience would be very excited to hear about a consistent result that showed promise in future studies.
 The most straightforward parts to prepare for the presentation were the methods and the future and implications. The methods portion was the easiest to portray because I had dove in very deeply when writing the different methods homework, so I found the steps very logical to summarize. In addition, I had done quite a bit of background research to look into future and implications, so I felt very proficient in indicating what the most relevant experiments were in the short term. However, I did not know how much knowledge the audience would know, so I am honestly still unclear if people were to understand the future experiments I was referring to. Overall, though, I think it was very clear as to why the research is interesting in pursuit of potential therapeutics.
 Once I decided what story I wanted to tell and the facts I wanted to cover, I worked on transitions to make the presentation flow nicely, even in the limited amount of time. I recorded myself a couple times to evaluate the logic of my statements, and settled on a final product. The time was obviously a concern throughout all of the preparation, but when it came time to record, my material was concise enough to make the presentation work in the 3 minutes, definitely MINI. Not only that, but I also feel exponentially more comfortable being able to prepare an elevator pitch for all different scenarios going forward. I think this was a very good start on my journey towards concise, effective speech.

MINI Cooper

MINI dog

MINI pony

Mod 1 Report: My Journey and Lessons Learnt

Let me first just start by saying this:

 

Now that’s out of the way ­­­­­_­­­­­‑ because again I really don’t like writing assignments ‑ let’s move on to the actual task at hand: discussing the Mod 1 report.

So when we first drafted for our Mod 1 report, me and my lab partner, Alex, started (quite) early to write our “Background and Motivation” section. It took us quite some time to figure out what to write. Though we did have some sort of idea on what to put in our introductory section, it was hard in the beginning to describe them in a very simple and concise manner. We ended up having a very rough draft, which we then brought to the BE communication lab for suggestions. At first, we were thinking of scheduling an appointment with Maxine, since she would have already some background/idea on how to approach this assignment; however, due to Maxine’s very early timeslot (which I am very against to wake up for), we ended up working with David, and I must say that our discussion went pretty well. Since David has practically zero knowledge on this project, we had to explain to him what our project is about. He would then read our introductory statements and see if the idea matches with what we just said. It really helped us to construct simple paragraphs which can be understood easily by someone who’s unfamiliar with the field.

A week passed, and we finally had one more weekend to finish up our report. I and Alex (and the entire 20.109 students) went to the Saturday day-long office hour to work on our report. Here I and Alex split our workload and focused on each of our own section. We both worked on separate Results section, where I was in charged in making the part 1-3 of our results section (part 1 however was just recycling past homework, so it was not that difficult). The hardest part for me in this section was on formatting figure for part 2 (which is basically just name of compounds, their Z-scores and CV). Unlike other groups which had only 5-10 hits, maybe 20 tops, our team had a ridiculous ~330 hits. This, of course, would be impossible to be represented by just simple table or graph. We obviously couldn’t show all of these hits even if we wanted to, and I had a trouble figuring out the best way to represent the data in a very neat way. After hours of pondering to myself (while googling for past journals, and playing facebook to help ease up the mind. Also, pizza helped us well. Thanks Leslie!), I came up with what I felt was the most optimal solution: a Z-score distribution. Sadly, however, Ms. Excel doesn’t have an easy and fast button to set up the histogram the way I like it to be, so I spent another hour just to format this figure, great, but once the figure was done, everything else that comes after (eg. the actual discussion) came naturally because the figure itself captured the entire essence of that result section, and writing of that was not too difficult.

I then continued by writing the Implications and Future work section. Surprisingly, I found this part to be very easy, as in I didn’t have to think real hard on what to write, and that’s very rare for someone like me. I finished the entire page in less than an hour, and was really content with what I wrote.

Alex and I then met again the next day to finally write our abstract and title. This again was not that difficult, I think, since all of our ideas have been well-established. Then again, Alex did most of this part (so it was really not that difficult for me), and I just added up a few things that I think was necessary to tie everything together, from the start to finish.

Looking back, I think the hardest part of this assignment was just my own inadequacy in English. Having to express your idea very scientifically in a second language was definitely challenging, and I have always been absolutely terrified whenever I have an English writing assignment. But still, if I had to choose something else other than English, the hardest part of the major assignments was to actually come up with a specific narrative for the report. This project can definitely be written in hundreds of different ways (probably an exaggeration, but you get the idea), and to pick one amongst many great story plots was certainly hard to do (this includes how and which data you would represent. eg. the Z-score distribution would now seem like an obvious choice for my case, but having no experience on science writing whatsoever, it took me a couple hours just to figure it out). 

I found a number of great ways to tackle this problem. First and foremost, pay attention to the 20.109 lecture during class and lab hour. I felt one thing that really helped me craft my story was listening to Prof. Kohler’s (very enthusiastic) lecture on the field. Coming up with this module, she, and other course instructors, of course had some sort of expectation to how the project (and consequently report) is going to be, and just picking up this ‘sprinkle of magic dust’ would definitely help with your mod 1 report. You may also want to reach out to your course instructors, lab partner, or BE communication lab fellow. Tell them your thoughts and listen to what they have to say; they might have some exciting or fresh new ideas that you can incorporate to your story. Also, assignments leading up to the major assignments were especially helpful for the summary report and mini ppt, so if there’s anything that the 20.109 instructors need to keep for future classes, it’s definitely that! (I’m also partly saying so that future students get to suffer through the sheer amount of assignments that I had been and still will be going through L ). Once you have that clear picture of your report, I feel that everything following was not that hard to execute. In that sense, I would probably approach the Mod 2 report the same way. I would first like to think of a story as a whole, write the intro, methods, results and discussions accordingly and logically and fill in any gaps to my story as necessary.

Happy Spring Break!

Selecting a Story in Scientific Writing

Writing the module 1 data summary showed me that science writing is much less straightforward than one would initially think.  Though they were not included in the paper, I liked writing the methods section as that appeared to be more concrete.  The methods section were like repeating instructions as clearly as possible to some target audience that would then attempt to duplicate our process and results.  With this process in mind, I felt that the methods were the simplest section to write.  Though the information that we had used in our experiments needed to be repackaged and justified for the audience, there was a clear goal in sight.  The core of the methods is based in objective fact that doesn’t vary from person to person but instead is the same across the board.  Experimental reproducibility in the methods section can be checked by many people and requires the same skills tested in cooking with a recipe or assembling furniture. Though methods may take work, they are a clear and definable section of the paper.

While I enjoyed doing the research and analysis that went into the introduction/background and results/discussion sections, I found these parts more difficult to write.  I thought that these parts may have been tougher to start simply because there were so many ways that our information could be communicated.  When writing my background information section, I came up with a narrative flow that made logical sense to me while other people came up with very different ways of framing the same information.  The results section allowed for even more variety.  Though it was interesting to see how our results and interpretation differed from other groups, I was often worried about whether or not the way I interpreted the data was sufficient or if it would make sense to the audience. Even the teaching staff represented a variety of opinions.  What one instructor liked in a paper another might not.  The huge amount of ways to represent and interpret information made writing these sections harder than a more straightforward section like methods.

One piece of advice that really helped was the suggestion that, as long as the paper can clearly communicate the background, data, and information, it works.  There is more than one right way, and people’s ideas of the right way to communicate are subjective.  Deciding on a story and figuring out which points need to be made in order to communicate that story in a way that is clear to the audience made the writing experience for the introduction and results  easier.  Unsurprisingly, I found that outlining really helped me organize my thoughts. I also learned that trying to explain a lab module and the significance of results to non-Course 20 friends allowed me to create a clear narrative with justifications and explanations present at each step.  In the next module I’m hoping to use the skills I learned in writing the data summary to clarify and simplify the writing process.

The hardest part of scientific writing for me is…

After completing the Module 1 Data Summary, I definitely found that writing some sections of a scientific "paper" were harder than others. For me, I consistently thought that the Results section was the easiest and most enjoyable to write. This was partially because throughout the practice we did in Mod 1, I started really enjoying making figures for our results, and it was a very natural workflow to consolidate a group of results in my head, make a figure summarizing them, them enumerate them out with each figure. I definitely think the organization of the Results in the Data Summary, where our results were presented "by figure" (i.e. one figure per slide), will help me organize my results in the research paper for Mod 2, since that was a new and helpful way to approach presentation of results. I also think, when considering all of the sections of a research paper, that my relative strength is presenting data, whether it be numeric or qualitative, so the Results section was the easiest to write up for me.

Even though Methods were not included in our Data Summary, from the homework assignments, I thought it was a really tough section to write, since it takes some practice to get a feel for how much or how little detail to include, the particular language to use, etc. Concision in writing is also really not one of my strengths (oops), so my Methods often turned out too wordy. With Methods actually being a part of the research paper in Mod 2, I'm going to have to pay particularly close attention to how I approach that section. In the context of an actual full-length research paper, I think it would definitely be helpful to write the Methods section immediately before the Results section, since that provides a somewhat parallel structure that could help make sure I'm not forgetting anything in the Results section that I did in the Methods.

I also found the Introduction/Background section to be difficult to approach, just because there's so much flexibility with how and what you decide to present there. Going off of that, I think that the single hardest thing about scientific writing from the context of the M1 Data Summary was deciding what story to tell. This dictated virtually all of the Introduction/Background and a large portion of the Discussion/Implications, and I think not having a defined story you want to tell before proceeding with the paper makes everything a lot harder. That is definitely something I will be keeping in mind going through Mod 2, and all the practice we did with scientific writing for the M1 Data Summary has genuinely been a huge help in becoming familiar with writing in that genre and in taking ownership of the work we've done.

A few particular things we learned that I found really helpful:

• How to write titles and captions! The whole idea of making titles of figures and of section headings a complete thought was new to me
• What to include vs. not include in Methods writing 
• How to make figures/schematics
• Organization of scientific writing in general
• All of the Communication workshop lessons were useful and I learned something new from each one of them