Mod 2 was so open-ended it was absolutely terrifying. I had no idea where to begin. Mod 1 had a very structured rubric and set of instructions all you really had to do was read it and do it. The only thing I was sure about for Mod 2 was “12 pt font”…not even which font…I could have hypothetically put the whole thing in monotype corsiva but don’t worry I stuck with Arial. There were so many different ways to tell your story from the data we had and so many random numbers in excel files, it was a little overwhelming to begin.  And since a lot of the data collection was done behind the scenes with flow cytometry, it took a little extra effort to understand what was going on. Once I did start, it always felt like I was just doing everything really wrong. But office hours were always really reassuring and I even used the BE communication lab to go over my introduction, which made me a lot more confident about my writing.  And again, I used my newfound knowledge of the amazing wonders of not procrastinating, got the project done Sunday night, and enjoyed Marathon Monday profusely. I may have spent a little too much time out of my weekend in 56-302, but I was always ten times more productive when I came to office hours.

Of course it was a little disappointing to have data that looked like 4 +- 27% with negative values that don’t really making sense, and everything turning out with “this data is significant at a p value of 0.6”

Some of the results from our experiments made it difficult to write a convincing story. But the fun part was justifying what we did, digging into previous research, and actually finding explanations for our results that made a whole lot of sense. It made me believe in my data a little bit more.

Overall, I was a little unsure about how my article turned out, it feels like it could go either way or I might have missed something big, but I think that’s just me being paranoid (checked my sent mail folder frantically at 5:01 pm to make sure sending it wasn't a dream).  No matter what, I definitely feel my writing skills have improved this semester and I’ve learned to be more clear and concise.