Adjusting to the new normal


These past few weeks have been a whirlwind as our lives have all been disrupted by this global pandemic. Acclimating to living at home again has been weird. On the positive side, it has been nice to spend time with family and also enjoy home cooked food. However, it has been very weird acclimating to a virtual college experience from home. Now, there is absolutely no boundary between home and school - quite literally since my desk is right next to my bed. Trying to stay active and healthy is also tough while being cooped up. With classes using Zoom or just pre-recorded lectures, I find myself spending upwards of nine hours a day sitting and staring at a screen as I need to complete classwork using a laptop as well. My eyes are quickly deteriorating, but maybe this is what it feels like to be a Course 6 student. Seeing and interacting with classmates on Zoom has been great but it doesn't substitute for the real thing :(. I miss being able to physically be in lab and surrounded by everyone. I really look forward to the time we will all return to campus, whenever that may be. 

As for 20.109, I have definitely been kept very busy for this first week of online learning. Learning through R exercises has been very challenging, but I appreciate everything that the instructors have done to try to help us through this transition as best they can. Much of my time has been taken up by lab and homework assignments. After turning in this revision for the data summary, I feel one chunk of 109 has been completed as we slowly chip away at all the assignments. Having had pretty limited experience writing for scientific communication, writing this data summary was pretty intimidating at first. First, I began to realize how difficult it was to create clear figures the effectively communicate the message that I want to display. On top of that, I found it particularly hard to relate the results and interpretation text to the figures the I made in a clear and concise way. Bringing all the data and figures together to deliver a cohesive take home message was also something I had to work on. I think I tend to write in longer sentences than necessary, and I would work on addressing that in future writing assignments. Overall, I felt that this assignment was a good learning experience since it taught me what is not good scientific writing, and the comments for the revision were especially helpful in pointing out areas that I need to work on. Writing is hard but a necessary component of communication, and I hope to put new and improved writing skills to use for the research article. For now though, I will have to focus on the journal presentation!

In the mean time, hope everyone is well and staying safe!
- Wenting

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