20.109 Reflection

Alternatively titled: WE'RE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know my enthusiasm at finishing may make it sound like I disliked 20.109, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Being at MIT can be scary. Actually, most of the time, it's scary. I'm scared I'm not going to do well, scared I'm not taking the right classes, scared that I chose the wrong major, scared of the "big, scary course 20 CIM" about which my older friends had warned me. At the beginning of the semester, I was quaking in my boots.
20.109 changed that for me. The opportunity to do such hands on work and so accurately simulate a laboratory environment in class truly solidified my choice in major and some of my hopes for when I'm done with MIT.
I loved 109. The work was difficult, and there was a lot of it, but I felt that all of it contributed to the purpose of developing my skills as a scientific writer and a biological engineer. This class, especially the final research proposal, helped to teach me how to think creatively and how to focus my interests in a productive academic way.
Also, the staff were (was? I'm in Bio E not English) incredible. I don't think I could write seven blog posts without mentioning that fact. The professors unique to each module were so knowledgeable about their subject matter and it was a pleasure to learn from them. As for Leslie and Noreen, I've never had an opportunity to get to know instructors so well since I've been at MIT, and it really shaped my interest in the class.
So, yes, I'm excited that it's over, but it's not because I didn't like the class. Rather, it's because I'm so proud of what I, and the entire 20.109S15 class, have accomplished, and of how much we've grown.
I'll say it again: WE'RE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Disheartening error bars, or, when you realize your data is not significant

Let’s find the subgroup analysis that looks somewhat significant! Hmm this one inhibitor in one situation looks really promising… To think of it, we didn’t cover the ethics or practice of leaving out data and focusing only on the positive results?

There are two conflicting forces at play whenever I begin to make figures: the need to explicitly and accurately convey technical information, and the desire to have visual cohesion and minimalism. This wasn’t a problem for the Mod1 report; although we performed various analyses using existing programs, they already looked visually acceptable and clear.

And then we learned about statistics. The guest lecture by Shannon was quite illuminating; I had been using t-tests and ANOVA p-values without precisely knowing how each value was calculated, and I learned a lot in this lecture. However, now there is no pretending like we don’t know how to calculate 95% significance from our data. The inclusion of these confidence intervals led to many of us experiencing the discomfort of having error bars that are larger than the sample space (Ie: 5 +/- 10).

This was of course an element in my figures that I didn’t find necessarily beautiful, so I tried several ways of pooling the data together such that it would be optimal in both conflict realms.  It was good in some respects, in that it did generate results acceptable of reporting, but it also led to me agonizing over what were the best ways to represent data over multiple variables. In the end, I’ve learned that aesthetics and comprehensive accuracy in figures are not a dichotomy, and you can have both with experience, and of course, more samples.

Significance is a funny thing; it is both definitively objective (p < 0.05) and entirely relative (I’ve learned a significant amount from this class!).  

Should I represent it all on one graph? Or four different sub graphs? Or maybe just compare xrs6 to…

On working with Cortni

So today, I actually planned on going to the goodbye party, eat some good food, be in the company of good people, only to wake up feeling really crappy. Good thing I didn't feel this way yesterday when it really mattered. But anyways, now I'm in bed finishing these blog posts which I should've done throughout the semester but oh well!

So for this post I wanted to talk about working with my great lab partner, Cortni (I wish I could tag her or something like on Facebook). I remember first walking into lab not really knowing people very well. None of my good friends from freshman year or sophomore are course 20 so it was about time I made some new friends. I sat down, started talking to this one girl and we were like "oh lets be partners." Little did we know the bonding experience we'd have over suffering through this class together. On the first day of lab, we didn't realize we were wearing the wrong goggles so we took this selfie:

We look great right. So half the time we were confused and were asking a million questions. But at least neither of us got upset about it. We both had super chill attitudes on everything:

Cortni: "Do you care which cut topology we pick?"
Me: "No."
Cortni: "Good because I signed us up for some random one that was left."

But still got things done correctly:

Everyone else: "Ugh our digest didn't work!"
Us: "Ours has two bands. Is that a problem?"
Everyone else: "No, that means it worked."

We both had similar goals:

Me: "I'm ready to sleep."
Cortni: "I'm already asleep."

Which kept us on the right track:

Me: "Let's yolo this and call it a day."
Cortni: "Yup sounds good to me."

In the end, Cortni and I worked really well together. Though we were almost like your underdog team trying to struggle bus through this class, we did well and got things done. And now I have a new course 20 friend! Yayayayayayayay!

On Team Presentations: a Double-edged sword

On Team Presentations: a Double-edged sword

I didn’t have to use this technique thanks to the seamless slide-making skills 20.109 taught me.

20.109 is the first major communications course in the department, and as such, it gave us the opportunity to develop both written and oral communication skills. At the beginning, I knew the written portion would be the challenging aspect for me, and where I could most improve. However, I also unexpectedly gained a lot of insight from the two presentations we had, the individual Mod 1 Research Article and team Mod 3 Research Proposal.

Comparing the two, there are definitely many differences that make for a more dynamic presentation, as Atissa mentioned. Watching all of our classmates present as teams, it was interesting to note how everyone had progressed from the first presentation. Presenting as a team, however, is intrinsically a double-edged sword, and while it can synthesize the best qualities of the presenters into a skillful, doubly-convincing delivery, it can also be difficult to control and may highlight contrasts that can be distracting or weakening to the overall process. However, in our class, everyone was able to minimize the potential risks and really integrated everyone into a solid presentation.

This team presentation came after my first-ever team presentation in 20.310, so I was very cognizant of the time and the transitions that needed to happen such that everything proceeded according to plan. When I present by myself, I am comfortable quickly improvising or altering my presentation on the go, so I don’t have to rigidly stick to a mental schedule and don’t get tripped up if I forget to say something or if I realize that I should add in a sentence or two I didn't plan earlier based on the flow. However, this is not possible with a team presentation; both people have to know exactly what is going on because there is no way to communicate to each other when it’s live. At the same time, having another person responsible for the presentation creates a system of checks-and-balances; when I work with another person, I want to be ready for every meeting and every mid-point deliverable, which helps a lot with the final product because I treat each progress point seriously. In this way I am much more consistently prepared for the final product than going solo. This benefit balances the potential risk involved in giving up complete control and trusting the other person to also be prepared.

Overall, I really enjoyed the team presentation and felt much more prepared than for our Mod1 presentation. I think it was more dynamic to perform and engaging to listen to. In the future, it’d be great to record the final presentation just for memories!

Thank You to all

Ok, so Tara did a post like this first, but I really want to say Thank You to some influential 20.109 people also.

First off, a big Thank You goes to Joseph for being a great lab partner! I think we made a great team, and helped each other out a lot. I was very nice that by the time it got to preparing the research proposal we were very used to working together, and we divided the workload among each other nicely. Never did I know that one of the first people I met at CPW would become my 20.109 lab partner! Maybe one day the Han-Hann technique for bone repair will become an actual thing. We will see.

Secondly, I would like to thank Noreen and Leslie. I really appreciate all of the office hours you both held on the weekends before large assignments were due. You really tried to be as accessible as possible to us and I think that is very unusual of instructors and I am happy that I could always reach out to both of you for help along the way. I would also like to thank you for staying late after class many days when Joseph and I were still finishing up our work. You both went above and beyond your "call of duty" :) I would especially like to thank Leslie for having many random conversations with me during long incubation periods. I enjoyed getting to know both Noreen and Leslie, and the lovely TA's as the class progressed. <3

Lastly I would like to thank the professors of 109! Unlike other lab classes at MIT I think it is cool that in 109 we do research that has not been done by many people before. You can tell that a lot of planning goes into the modules, and troubleshooting. I enjoyed getting to know each of the professors  and the research that they do in their respective labs. I now know some more Course 20 faculty, which is cool. I would especially like to thank Professor Belcher for helping Joseph and I a lot with the final project! She was easy to schedule meeting times with, and very open to helping us develop our initial idea into something doable.

Also-- classmates you are pretty cool too. I hope you all remain in Course 20, and that we cross paths many times in the future!

Adventures in TEM

Last Tuesday I sprained my left ankle while playing tennis. Lucky me, I got to use crutches for four days, hobbling my way around campus with aching armpits and a really sore right leg. Now, normally, we perform most of our lab work sitting down at our lab bench so the physical status of my left ankle is not a concerning matter.

However, the day after I sprained it, we arrived in lab, eager to perform the long awaited TEM imaging of our gold nanoparticles and Professor Belcher informed us that we would have to hurry over to building 13. For reference, it took me over 20 minutes to get from Maseeh to Hayden Library (and a whole lot of huffing and puffing). There was no way I would be able to hurry over on my crutches.

Thankfully, someone came up with the brilliant idea of me being pushed around on one of the swivel-rolling chairs that we usually sit on for lab work. So I hopped onto one of the chairs (sans armrests, which I guess could have been dangerous, but oh well, we live life on the edge), and my wonderful lab partner Tara proceeded to push me down two floors, through the infinite (to the surprise of more than a couple of students), down another flight of stairs, over some asphalt, and finally to the long awaited TEM room.

The TEM was a hulking, off-white machine controlled by a massive control panel that looked like one of those mission control dashboards from Hollywood space movies. The long, cylindrical series of lenses extended well past the tops of our heads and though the room was a little cramped, our group of six people attempted to all squeeze in.

The person operating the TEM was apparently a solar cell expert who had been preparing them for years and operating this fine (and assuredly expensive) piece of equipment). He, along with Professor Belcher, talked us through some of the procedural steps as they prepped our copper meshes and focused the electron beam.

Finally, with the lights dimmed and our group metaphorically holding a collective breath, the first image appeared on the screen.

It looked like a blob. Like an amorphous, grayish, tentacle-like blob. Apparently it was mineralized phage with titania. But it mostly looked like a blob. Further searching, zooming, and focusing finally revealed a large black circle in the middle of the grayish blob.

We had found gold! The Blue team had used 12nm particles and on the computer screen before us was an image of a gold nanoparticle. The resolution was such that we could see straight lines across the particle, indicating the structural planes of the particle. Elemental analysis of their sample also confirmed the presence of gold, which was exactly what we were hoping for in our quest for the most efficient solar cell.

Finally, it was our turn. It was time for the Red team to kick butt in the looking-at-gold-nanoparticles department. Admittedly, we already knew that our efficiency had been abysmally low (as I have alluded to in previous posts), but we had hopes that it was simply due to poor doctor-blading (also described at length in Tara’s post). We had started with 5nm particles so Professor Belcher warned us that sometimes these could be very difficult to see, let alone find in the great, gray chaos.

There were a couple of false alarms here and there, Professor Belcher a self-proclaimed optimist, but ultimately, nothing was found. There were no visible particles, and certainly none as clear and striking as the gold nanoparticle we had just seen for the Blue team. We crossed our fingers for a good elemental analysis, but that also demonstrated a lack of gold presence. We were comforted by the fact that oftentimes, TEM imaging can take hours to fully explore the entire copper mesh, and that it was possible given more time, we would indeed have found the gold that we were looking for. But since we had only searched for 5-10 minutes, it was not surprising that our small particles were temporarily unfindable (I am optimistically excluding the possibility that they were in fact nonexistent).

Perhaps our solar cell failure was due not only to a nightmare of a doctor-blading experience, but to a lack of gold nanoparticles as well. There are so many questions that would need to be answered for us to determine exactly what went wrong, but we have our hypotheses.

Using the TEM was a really cool experience because we were looking at things only nanometers wide! Having access to all of these amazing pieces of equipment, like the solar simulator as well, has been a great and exciting opportunity, and though ultimately we didn’t find what we were looking for in our sample, we still had the chance to look at the results from all the other groups in the dropbox folder.

I also had a blast being wheeled back to lab on the wheely-chair. What else would lab partners be for, if not to wheel your crippled self through the infinite and back? (Oh yeah, science.)

Thanks Tara, I’m your number one fan. 

20.109 Fostered Teamwork

Beyond the writing and oral practice that 20.109 gave us, I believe we also learned a lot about teambuilding and teamwork through the class.  Throughout the whole class, everyone was paired up with another lab partner to do all the experiments.  This not only saved resources but also allowed everyone to bounce ideas and questions off each other.  Because we were allowed to leave class when we were done with our experiment, there was an incentive for everyone to work efficiently.  However more often than not, it seemed like Hannah and I were always the last ones or close to the last ones to leave…but looking back, it wasn’t as bad as being the last person to finish by yourself. 

I also believe that the mod3 mini-report was an assignment that fostered teamwork.  For the most part, the assignment was completed in class so we didn’t have the luxury of taking all the time we needed.  As such, Hannah and I split up certain sections of the mod3 report.  If we didn’t have two people working on the report, I don’t know if I would have been able to finish the report in time given the time constraint.

Lastly, I think that the final research proposal was the best teambuilding exercise.  The scope of the assignment was so grand that it would have been very difficult to have done by yourself.  With an assignment such as this, it was very important to be able to bounce ideas off of each other.  Hannah and I were able to split up the jobs well…Hannah worked on certain sections while I worked on others.  She also met with certain experts on certain aspects of the mechanical testing such as her pI, while I met with experts on the M13 phage such as Professor Belcher and Po-Yen, a graduate student in the Belcher Lab.  Practicing late at 2AM as also not as bad as having to practice at 2AM by yourself.  I think that the teamwork aspect of this assignment played a large part in making this assignment fun and enjoyable.

20.109 has been fun and frustrating at the same time, but I’m glad to have been able to work in a team throughout 20.109.  I’m glad Hannah and I were lab partners, because I think we made up a good team.

-Joseph Han