FINISSHHHEEEDDD!! With the Mod 1 report...

After a busy week and eventful weekend dealing with a bunch of cute little kids and their crazy parents, I somehow managed to squeeze in this Mod 1 abstract and data summary and crank out the goodies. I must say, that right now I feel both exhausted and liberated. Staying up late to finish this report, memories from freshman year came back in which all of us freshmen in my entry messed around while the older residents in classes like 6.005 stayed up until the early hours of the morning, finishing endless assignments. Now I'm the old person, wow that went by fast. On another note, I like how this assignment was due at the beginning of the week as opposed to the end; now everything else from here until spring break (yay sunshine and warmth!) feels like a cakewalk.

As for doing the assignment itself, I'll try and recall specifics as it felt like I was in one giant haze the whole time I was writing it (hopefully this doesn't show negatively in my end product). The most difficult part of this Mod 1 report for me was definitely the data analysis. Not having much experience with or knowledge on bacterial strains, it was hard for me to look at individual bird gut microbiota and come up with possible reasons for why the bacterial strains were present. I feel like suggesting some papers to read that give good information characterizing specific bacterial species would be helpful in analyzing our bird's gut. Secondly, as Will has already said, I found it hard to deduce patterns and correlations on compositions of the guts from only eight birds from two relatively close locations. Were these observed patterns significant or just the result of a small noisy, sample pool? At times I felt almost as if I was reaching so far that I was completely making things up out of thin air. Overall though, I definitely feel like this assignment helped prepare me for future scientific writing. The main guts of a paper were laid out and it really wasn't that terrible. Having done the majority of this assignment in one day and subsequently feeling proud of my end results, I definitely feel like in the future, I will be much more able to write a whole, legitimate, publisher-worthy paper. And that is pretty cool.