As I mentioned in a previous post, I attended Codestellation this past weekend – the fourth annual beginner-friendly hackathon hosted on my campus. I had heard about it last year, but I didn’t get a chance to participate due to being busy with the start of my Master’s program. When I saw the flyers around campus for this year’s event, I knew I had to seize the opportunity to attend. I’m so excited that I did!
The First Successful Gene Therapy for the Worst Disease You’ve Never Heard Of
In October 2015, a 7-year old boy received life-saving surgeries involving skin grafts made from his own modified skin cells in the first successful gene therapy to-date for junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB).
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Blog Update!
Happy November!
Halloween has come and gone, and I haven’t made a post here in a month. Yikes! Research and report writing, as well as job hunting, have been keeping me quite busy, but that’s no excuse for my lack of writing here.
Updates in this post:
- Science Fridays
- Codestellation
- Progress in Python and Japanese studies
Progress Update: Japanese Studies
Hello, hello!
It’s almost October, can you believe it?
Today, I’ll be sharing another progress update with regards to my Japanese studies.
The Challenge of Novelty
Hello again, and happy September!
It seems like my posting is now becoming monthly, instead of weekly – and for this, I apologize! Research has been keeping me busy, along with other things. By the time I finish my work for the day and have dinner, all I want to do is relax! (And study Japanese, which I’ve been determined to make time for in the evenings as consistently as possible.)
Progress Update: Japanese Studies
Hello, and happy August!
I apologize for my lack of posts in the past 2 weeks. I know that I said before that I would post at least once a week, but keeping up that posting schedule has been difficult in the past few months.
Today, I’d like to share another progress update with regards to my Japanese studies!
Progress Update: Japanese Studies
I have been procrastinating a lot with my Japanese studies, and progress has been slow. I get motivated, I study for a while, and then life gets in the way and I stop. Then, I pick it back up again after a few months, and the cycle continues. I have found it quite difficult to maintain a consistent study schedule, and being in graduate school has made it more challenging. Of course, as the saying goes, making up excuses is itself its own excuse!
And so, I have a new goal: Complete Genki Vol. 1 by the time I graduate with my Master’s degree (which will officially be in May of next year).
In this post, I’ll be sharing what I have been up to lately with regards to my self-studying.
Progress Update: Python
I can’t believe it has been three months since I started learning Python!
(Or rather, it’s been three months since I started from scratch with Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes, after giving up on Codeacademy’s Python course for various reasons, which I wrote about here.)
I’m about halfway through PCC so far, nearly done with chapter 6 (about dictionaries). I really enjoy this book, and I’m so glad I came across it in the public library when I did. In this post, I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned from experimenting with different approaches to not just understanding the material, but remembering it.
How to Read Scientific Journal Articles
During my researching and reading for my thesis project proposal (which I should finish soon!), I’ve come to realize that my ability to discern whether a given paper will be useful has improved a lot since I began graduate school. Before, I would have to read a paper in its entirety to figure out if I need it or not, which puts quite a few hours of valuable time down the drain.
My first semester in the program, I had a lot of papers to read each week for two reading-heavy courses, and I found myself struggling to keep up some weeks more than others. I spoke with professors and classmates and did some Googling to get some ideas of how to read long and/or dense papers more quickly without losing understanding of the material, but the biggest teacher has really been simple: just read more papers. This was one of the first pieces of advice I received, but at first, I wasn’t convinced it was very helpful. Why would reading more papers help if the sheer number and length of papers I had to read was what I was struggling with in the first place?
What Undergraduate Biology Laboratory Courses Don’t Teach You
Hello again!
I apologize for the lack of posts as of late. I have been adjusting to a new routine of lab work in the summer, as well as working on a proposal for my upcoming thesis project in the fall semester. I went home for some vacation time – only 4 weeks – and I have been slowly plodding through a cold I managed to catch (probably while I was traveling).
Since returning to the lab (more regularly at least than during the previous spring semester), I have come to realize that learning in a lab is different now, as a graduate student, than it was when I was an undergraduate student. That’s what I’m going to talk about in this post!
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Brain Bonbons 