The end of Mod 2

It's hard to believe we've completed our first two modules. I remember scrolling through the course schedule on the wiki and thinking to myself, "This is going to be a long semester." The days went by in a whirlwind of pipetting and incubations, though, and now here we are, 16 lab days later, with journal club presentations, data summaries, and mini presentations under our belts.

How I'm feeling as we enter Mod 3.

Module 2 has been a particularly educational experience for me with respect to data analysis. Before this module, I had not applied statistical/analytical methods to large sets of actual data derived from experimentation, so I enjoyed learning R and applying stats techniques. There's nothing like generating heat maps and interpreting data to make you feel like a real scientist. 

Additionally, I enjoyed the fact that we applied the exact clustering methods we learned about in 6.00 to our data. It's always nice having validation that the things we learn in class do, in fact, have real-world applications that relate to our field of interest.

Before Mod 2, I had also not had experience with quantitative PCR or RNA-seq. I enjoyed the variety of different experiments we completed. They allow for the choice between many different stories in our research articles, depending on how we interpret data. Though I am feeling intimidated by the assignment itself, I am enjoying the opportunity to craft this story.