Reflections on 20.109

Today was the last lecture of 20.109, and as I signed off the Zoom call, I felt a little flutter of sadness. 20.109 presented a unique dynamic that I'd never had in a class before. I'd never had to spend 5 hours a day in class for a single course, or had to present my own novel ideas and be subjected to the interrogations of my classmates or instructors, or write my own research article draft. I learned a bunch of new skills in 20.109, but the following were the ones that will stick with me the most.

1. Schematics - I learned to LOVE making schematics. So much so, in fact, that I am strongly considering buying a BioRender subscription, which is something I usually avoid at all costs. There's something so satisfying about generating your own schematics for presentations and controlling every aspect of the story the image tells. I love coordinating the colors and paring the experimental details down to what is absolutely necessary to tell the story.

2. Effective presentations - it turns out I was doing presentations wrong this whole time. Gone are the days where I title my slides boring, uninformative headings like "Methods" and "Conclusions" - the trick is writing a sentence with the idea you want your audience to take away, and after that, the slide basically writes itself.

3. Collaboration on writing projects that goes beyond just dividing up the sections. Allison and I made a great partnership, and after a while, our communication got to the point where we could actively sit down and write slides together, run ideas by each other, and correct each other as we wrote. I had never been good and communicating my unwritten ideas to another person before, so this was a huge stride for me. 

I will truly miss this class, its teaching staff, and my classmates. I am truly grateful for the experience I learned and I am now only more cemented in my decision to study biological engineering.