BE 20.109(S20) Class blog

Looking back at the semester, it definitely will be one to remember. I am really grateful at how accommodating the 20.109 staff has been, and I feel like I still gained a ton from this class even though we were not able to do the lab portion of in person. I truly enjoyed the three modules and I found that each one was interesting and taught me techniques and skills that will be applicable to future work. I loved hearing everyone’s research proposals and I am glad that everyone remained invested in the class, despite it being through zoom, which made the presentations a lot more interesting. I hope everyone has a great summer and I look forward to hopefully seeing everyone in the fall.

One positive aspect of doing school from home has been being able to bring my dogs to school with me. I never thought I would see the day when I could bring my dogs to lab, but the whole second half of the semester, my dogs have learned a ton about using R studio, RNA seq, qPCR, FACS, etc. Having my dogs in the lab has been probably the only silver lining to the work from home situation, but I am grateful for this opportunity. Last semester, I remember wishing my parents would let me bring one of my dogs to MIT to hang out with me and sit in on lectures. Little did I know that would become a reality the following semester.  Since bringing the dogs to school, I have actually learned a lot about their study habits: Molly (the white and tan dog) is definitely the ADHD dog. She is good at sitting in on lecture and focusing as long as there is nothing else going on at the house. Otherwise she just whines until I dismiss her. Moxy (the white and black dog) is really the best at jus...

It's hard to believe that sophomore year is essentially over. These past several weeks have especially been very odd and I think I've still had a weird time processing how much things have changed (and will change) with our MIT education. Moving 109 to an online format is no easy task, HUGE shoutout to all the instructors and professors for being so on top of your shtuff and doing lots of the heavy lifting in our transition to ZoomU. Also big shoutout to Becky for answering my 100 emails <33333 I just turned in my mini report, and now I'm writing my absolute final assignment of this class (dis blog). It feels WEIRD. When did I ever NOT have assignments for 109? It just became such a constant part of my weekly routine that now that I won't have figures or outlines due, I won't know how to act.  I also wanted to reflect a bit on our proposal presentations because I thought they were super super cool. I know that Karenna and I had a really great time reading...

Well, friends, we have finally made it to the end. There were moments when I genuinely didn't think I would make it, due to my laziness alone, but amplified by getting evicted from campus. I really had no idea how this class could be pulled off in a remote format, but I can now say that it actually adapted far better than my other classes. I can say that because I still feel like a part of this class, this community, and I am sad seeing it come to an end. The Mini Report for Module 3 is just one example of this class banding together to continue our lab education without actually being in a lab. Though we weren't able to run any of the experiments ourselves, we were still able to analyze data and come to reasonable conclusions, just as we would be doing for other researchers' data. I am far more confident in my abilities as a scientist and researcher after these 3 Modules: 1 fully in-person, 1 half-remote, and 1 fully remote. I developed skills I never knew I may need, but ...

I think this semester is one that is always going to be singularly, hopefully at least, unique. I certainly hope that I will look back one day from the far far future and realize how interesting I am and we are to have lived through a piece of history that will undoubtedly show up in a book. As I am writing this, almost everything has wrapped up for the semester and I'm still taken aback by how different everything is currently to what I had imagined. For someone who likes to stringently roadmap and plan things, pandemics are somewhat troublesome, mildly speaking of course. It's not exactly like I could've went back to January 2020 me and told myself to just set aside a few months period(as of now) wherein the world will turn upside down. So yes, we are no longer on campus, we truly have become Zoomers, my Brass Rat came by mail, and I haven't had a normal interaction with people outside of my family in about two months -- the order and importance of these events are up...

The end of this class feels like there's still unfinished business, but I feel like that is the inevitable outcome of a lab class going remote. Module 3 seemed like a really interesting experiment to perform in person, so I'm definitely a little bummed that we could only experience it virtually with different data analysis platforms. Overall though, 20.109 was one of the most relevant and interesting classes I have taken at MIT. It was my first taste of course 20 lab classes, and I was excited that some of the techniques we used in lab were things I had done before in internships and UROPs. It makes the work we do seem so much more relevant to my future endeavors in research. Moreover, I have never done this much scientific writing before, and it was rewarding to get so much feedback from the BE Comm Lab and the professors. Thank you all for an enjoyable semester and for working so hard to convert the class to an online format in a very small period of time.

I can’t believe that the semester is ending! It’s gone by so quickly! Reflecting on my 20.109 experience, I feel that I’ve definitely learned a lot not only about different bioengineering techniques, but also about scientific writing and presentations. I’m sad that we weren’t able to carry out the lab experiments for Mod 2 and 3, but glad that we were able to make the most out of the situation by still analyzing the data and getting a sense of the protocols. One part of the 20.109 experience I really enjoyed was working on the research proposal. It was initially really difficult for my partner and I to come up with a “novel” research idea; we didn’t even know where to start! I ended up just choosing a very broad research area, and started reading papers, especially reviews, to identify knowledge gaps. I learned a lot of cool things through this process, and I do think it helped us finally come up with a set of ideas. Having a lab partner was really helpful for this process, a...