Finished with Mod 2 and on to Mod 3!

After being awake for almost 36 hours, I finally finished the report!  Today I’ve pulled my first all-nighter this semester…I think? Well hopefully I won’t have to do that again!

It’s been a crazy weekend...from being occupied with ROTC at 5:30am Saturday till Sunday afternoon, then coming back and immediately working on 20.109 in the free time I had Sunday afternoon…then heading to NYC for an interview Mon morning and coming back Tuesday night…and starting the bulk for the report.  I don’t think I’ve ever worked so long on one assignment for a consecutive period of time until now…it is both a very rewarding and stressful experience.

A random fact: When I was doing the report last night, I thought it’d be a good idea to have a Monster energy drink because apparently they help people study (I never drink energy drinks)…but I think I learned that instead of helping me focus, Monster gives me stomach aches…never drinking Monster again.

In any case, it feels good to be done!  Before starting the report though, it was pretty daunting to think that I would have to write around 10-13 pages, especially because I find it hard to write more than several pages for most of the writing intensive classes I’ve take so far.  But scientific writing is a different beast than creative writing…it’s easier to write a lot because a lot of the time you’re explaining data and results that you received from an experiment, so you don’t have to think too much about what you want to write about.  It definitely takes some getting used to, to be able to write in a scientific and technical style, but I think will all the practice I’ve been doing so far, I’m definitely improving. 

Even though I found it tedious at times to turn in the figures and methods drafts in incremental steps as homework assignments, it really prepared us for the mod 2 report.  I’m super glad about that because it definitely saved a lot of time while writing the report.  I cannot imagine how much longer it would have taken if we didn’t have those homework assignments.

After writing two reports for the modules we’ve done so far, I can say for sure that I’ve improved my writing skills in general, especially in the field of science writing.  

Time really flew by and we only have a month left till this year’s over! Wow!  I’m glad that it’s almost over because this has been a tough semester, but I’ll miss it at the same time!

Looking forward to mod 3 and the end of school!

-Joseph H.