Well that happened….

Coming into 20.109, I felt that I had gotten a decent warning about how much work it would be, but still it didn’t prepare me for the DNA engineering summary that I (literally) just finished. I am a procrastinator by heart and although it’s come back to bite me in the butt a few times, generally it’s a successful way of life for me. Procrastination, however, means that it’s not the figures or analysis that’s the hardest for me; it’s just the motivation to get started in the first place. I wrote my methods section in around 24 hours and although it was tiring, I felt that I had devoted a good amount of time to it. With that mentality and also knowing this assignment was longer, I decided that 50 hours of time would suffice and therefore I would begin working on the data summary on Thursday afternoon. It is also important to note that I am traveling for the weekend, so I spent 9 hours of Friday sitting in an undersized Megabus seat. For some reason, it never dawned on me that perhaps given the circumstances, I should start the assignment earlier. Alas, my procrastination took over and I progressed through the assignment at a much slower speed than anticipated. As 5am on Saturday rolled around, I realized maybe a late day might be worth it. After giving myself this extra time, I was able to complete the assignment in a comfortable and non-stressful way.

There are definitely a few things I REALLY hope I’ve learned from this experience:

1.     Prepare figures and captions as the images and data become available; write a (very) rough draft of the results and discussion as soon as possible

2.     Complete edits and revisions as soon as comments are given back

3.     STOP PROCRASINATING.

Although I’m sure I’ll never truly embrace that last point, I’m hoping that I can at least adopt it for this class because I know it’ll save me a lot of anxiety and sleep deprivation in the future. Module 2 here I come!!!