Drafts

I remember the first day of class, when professor Brewer gave each of us a cellar spider in a small plastic cup and told us to write a description of it in detail. It was a good introduction for both the Drafts and the Perfect Paragraphs assignments, and my first Perfect Paragraph came out of that class. Having written a few drafts about the subject in my notes, when I started writing that assignment I had no trouble thinking of new things to add, and it allowed me to think more about how to improve it as best as possible. At the beginning of the semester I used the Perfect Paragraphs assignment as an opportunity to write about things that I find interesting in science, but as exams and other assignments came I focused my work towards improving writings for my classes. Regarding the comments that we had to post weekly, it helped me think about how we write and the mistakes that I should avoid. Nonetheless, as the semester came to its end, I started noticing that other people's paragraphs had improved in quality and commenting on them proved to be more difficult. I feel that a similar thing happened for some people that commented on my paragraphs, since I sometimes struggled to understand their comments. The Perfect Paragraphs assignment has helped me think more about the content of my writing, and now I think more about how to approach written assignments in order to make myself clear.

I feel like the Drafts weekly assignment was useful for improving my organization skills, and also my approach towards writing better papers. Before starting to work on the Drafts assignments for the first time, I thought that it would be difficult to write six drafts in the blog for each week. It seemed like a small task as professor Brewer explained it to the class, especially if we organized it in the reccomended 30 minute slots, but I wasn't sure if I would find enough material to write about during the semester. At the beginning of the semester I struggled to write drafts, but once a few weeks in the flow of classes allowed me to come up with enough material for writing. I think that writing drafts for this class helped me a lot in other classes. In particular, Animal Movement required me to write six one-page summaries of scientific papers, and thanks to this practice I was able to condense my ideas into more effective paragraphs.

Performing our experiment felt very overwhelming at first. I was not sure how we would catch enough spiders or actually set up the experiment. However, with help from our professor and others we were able to collect the materials we needed and have a space to actually perform our tests. We set up coolers in the BCRC as well as heat lamps over the thanksgiving break. Unfortunately I was not able to help as much as I liked to during the experimental phase due to thanksgiving and other obligations. It was very difficult for me to understand the statistics involved in analyzing our results and data. Luckily our professor once again saved the day and did his best to explain how everything worked. Once we had our results and understood what they meant we began to create our poster. Learning how to make a poster was extraordinarily helpful. I had never done this before and I am sure I will need to make more in the future. I would have liked to be a bigger help in this process, and I did my best to help my fellow team members out with the little time I was allowed to. We went through several drafts of a poster and I made suggestions on what we could improve where necessary. I was fairly happy with our final poster, and I believe our presentation went well. It was interesting to see everyone elses experiments as well, especially when comparing ours to other groups that did similar experiments.

The proposal project was very daunting at first. I had never even thought about doing a task such as this before and I was unsure of where to start. It was difficult for me to think of a topic of study to propose, but once we found something interesting, I got rather excited about the project. There was a lot of research that had to be done in order to properly plan out the experiment of course, much more than I initially suspected. Almost the entire process was admittedly foreign to me, so this project gave me valuable experiments for my future. I never thought of how a study was published in a journal before, and this opened my eyes to that process. I will definitely look back to this project as guidance if I am ever to perform my own research and publish my work in a journal.

I felt much the same way about the perfect paragraph assignments as I did with the drafts. Of course this task seemed much more manageable than the latter as it was only required once a week. For this, the purpose was clear, we take the rough flow of consciousness of our drafts and refine it. This was to further help our writing skill in a way that was more than just practice, but to really think about the details of how our paragraphs were laid out. As I did more perfect paragraphs, I began to notice how I could improve my writing more and more. I noticed little details I may have omitted in previous drafts and improved the overall flow of my paragraphs. I feel as if a little more direction and input into how well my paragraphs were written would have been useful, but regardless I feel as if my writing skills have improved. In the future I will continue to write in this method, especially given my difficulty beginning to write. I will attempt to lay out all the information in a relatively organized way, followed by a refining process where I improve it bit by bit. Just as we did with the perfect paragraph and draft assignments.

               The methods project had a couple had a couple difficulties but ultimately proved useful. This was the first time I had to use a computer image editor/ figure creator and Inkscape was difficult to understand in the beginning. Before I even had to generate an initial figure though, the methods section I wrote had to be changed to be less direct and giving directions to someone and more what exactly I had done. Usually, when I write a procedure for a chemistry lab report, it is direct “pour X amount in flask” but this had to be worded differently. The part of this project that replicated images was also helpful when we had the class and went over everyone’s comparison figures. It really showed how different perspectives and readings of methods can give different results and how exact the methods should try to be, including as many details as possible. The end manuscript for this assignment was also a challenge to write because its format was unlike anything I had previously composed. I never had to submit anything under manuscript guidelines, but given that I would eventually like to, this proved as a useful introduction to what that process may be like.

Perfect Paragraphs: This project was most useful for me in reading the comments other students wrote on my posts. I realized some aspects of my writing style could improve, and tried to use the feedback to improve my writing style. When the project started I found it difficult to differentiate between my drafts and my perfect paragraphs. As the semester went on, I learned how to edit and refine my draft posts to make them into better paragraphs. This is a skill that I will use in all of my future writing projects, and would not have had learned if it was not for this aspect of the class. I found at times it was difficult to comment on other students posts because I simply could not find anything wrong with their writing. I learned to look deeper into their writing and point out things that would have otherwise went unnoticed if I had not been paying close attention. 

Proposal: This project showed me how important it is to present your idea for a research project in a clear, concise, and appealing manner. When we started this project, I was not that excited about the topic my group had chosen but I gradually warmed up to it when we started putting our proposal together. I realized that even though the topic was not super interesting or novel, it could still be presented in a way that could gain some interest from other students in the class. I thought that writing a proposal would be similar to writing a scientific paper, but it was much much different. It was difficult writing the proposal without knowing if the results that we would collect would be significant enough to make doing the experiment worth it. From this project I learned that even if you do not know what the outcome of your experiment will be, it is still important to be confident in your proposal and provide a concise summary of what you know, and what you hope to find. 

This experiment showed the ability of S. cerevisiae to ferment three different sugars, lactose, glucose, and sucrose. It was expected that this bacterium would only be able to ferment glucose and sucrose, but my observations revealed that it was able to ferment all three sugars. CO2 gas was observed in all three Durham tubes, and the media in all three tubes changed color from purple to yellow. This clearly showed that S. cerevisiae is able to ferment a variety of sugars, even one that is not present in its natural environment.

The results from this experiment were in accordance with my expected results. When observing the FPDA and PCA plates side by side, there was significantly more penicillium growth on the FPDA agar than the PCA agar. There was growth on approximately 90% of the FPDA plate compared to only about 50% on the PCA plate. The mold on both plates grew outwards in a circular pattern from the point of inoculation with lines radiating outwards from the center. The penicillium on the FPDA plate grew much further away from the center of the agar than it did on the PCA agar. The mold on both plates was green and white colored. The white structures were observed to be hyphae and the green structures were observed to be spores. The penicillium on the FPDA plate was brighter and more vibrantly colored than it was on the PCA plate. The penicillium on the PCA plate was dull and had a brown hue.