Should I be course 6 😲? -- Emily's Second Blog Post

I always used to say I hate coding especially during and after 6.00. But the coding assignments in 20.109 actually turned out to be quite fun. This is a breakdown of what I went through for each R exercise:

Hour 1: *intense confusion*
Hour 2: first attempts at coding, really just poking at letters and copying old code over
Hour 3: clever edits to old code, intense googling, very hard thinking. emotion: disstress
Hour 4: why does my graph look like that!?!? why;
Hour 5: I somehow generate results which look like they could be right. Feel a huge sense of satisfaction. The sun has set, but I feel accomplished.

This is what my heartbeat looks like when I code.
√v^√√v^√v^√√v^√v^√v^√v^√√v^——√v^√√v^√v^√√v^√v^√—♥
  *this is fine*                    *I'm struggling wow*                  * SOS SOS SOS panic and mayhem *                           *wow it worked? disbelief*

I would be very pleseantly surprised when the next day my figures mostly matched the figures generated from the sample code the instructors sent out. A huge pat on the back for me, I do say so myself. Part of the reason I could get through these exercises is that over IAP I took 20.260 Computational Analysis of Biological Data. That class was realllllly hard. We were learning new coding techniques to use things like GSEA and basic machine learning on public data sets, and every day I could barely get through the classwork. I remember the first time learning about "gene set enrichment analysis" in that class I was like ~what on earth is going on~, but then learning about the idea of differential expression in Module 2 here, and then applying some GSEA in one of the R exercises, and then finally seeing it come up again in my journal club article was crazy good for my understanding. So it turns out I absolutely need to learn the same concept three times to fully understand it! 3x 3x 3x love it

 And then last week my UROP mentor messages me like, hey Emily I hear you're learning RNAseq in one of your classes, so how about for your new online project we look at GSEA to identify key genes involved in nanoparticle uptake? (my urop is about drug-loaded nanoparticles to treat brain cancer 🧠🧠) Like wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love this class!!!

In conclusion: (1) I love the feeling of knowing that what we are learning is immediately useful in situations outside of class. (2) Coding and I have a toxic relationship in that the more frustrating it is the more satisfied I get in the end. 😂😂😓😓😜

Sincerely,
Emily



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