Module 2 Debriefing

Module 2 was definitely a new experience for everyone. Getting used to having to work at home was very weird. It is kind of funny how my 3 younger brothers and I will spend the days scattered throughout the house having class online at the same time. I found writing the Journal Club Presentation more difficult than the data summary, mostly because I found the subject less interesting than I’d thought it would be. The paper I had chosen ended up feeling less like an actual experiment and more like they just grabbed some pre-existing data and threw a bunch of analysis methods at it. That’s not to see anything is wrong with that, and they did find some interesting results, but it was not the sort of thing that really excited me, which made it much more difficult to write about it. The Research Article, now that I’ve started writing, does not strike me as too bad, especially because I feel that the story flows rather well. I also feel I can’t not mention how annoying the R exercises were. I didn’t feel I could really learn it the way it was presented, as the focus seemed to be more on copy pasting the code from examples or previous exercise rather than actually understanding and building the programs we had to use. Admittedly, there is an abbreviated amount of time with which to learn it, but then what’s the point of not really learning it? I feel that I would have gotten just as much information from being given the graphs upfront and then learning how to analyze them. Essentially, the fact that “I” generated the graphs did not really enhance my ability to understand them, it was more the lectures and pre lab that helped me do that. 

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