Author: Alvin Kissoon

I enjoyed the STEAM Fest it was really fun and interesting seeing other students projects and interacting with students from other Macaulay campuses as well as younger classes. Furthermore, showcasing our own projects also had it’s own merits in speaking about the things we did throughout the semester and the work we put in to get our finished products. BioBlitz itself was very fun for me, the data and information not so much, I didn’t quite understand it myself and would have liked if we went over it in more depth in the class. I didn’t feel like the science senses were a good framework for the course because we didn’t really use them all that much, it was just an idea we had that we would throw in here and there and show how it applied. I enjoyed the 3D printing experience, that was a really fun part of the course and I loved how it was incorporated. The website was mostly used to submit assignments, the tutorials were also helpful from time to time, a reminder that assignments are due would be nice like a timer, because I tend to not check the website very often. Overall, I enjoyed the course I just wish we had more time for Dr. Greer’s science experiments those were my favorite parts of the course.

The purpose of doing a lab in school is to have a hands on experience of the things we read about and how they work. It is useful that a lab is in a controlled environment with an expected result because it gives you the ability to know that you performed the lab correctly. Furthermore, if you did perform the lab incorrectly it gives you steps to take to redo the lab to find out where you went wrong. I don’t feel like labs are necessary for non specialist science courses because we’re more getting an overview of the topic rather than performing it in a sense, however, it is still useful in allowing us to see the practical side of that topic. From this lab experience I hope to be able to see the chemicals reacting and the different procedures and overall I just hope to see the process of creating a drug. A lab in a non science course would be any practical experience for example in a Law class it would be a case study, or in history maybe an archaeological hunt, some sort of hands on experience. You can’t use the same style of writing in a lab as you would in other types of writing because the specific sections serve different purpose in the lab and as such need to be divided up and written about separately.

The article was very well written and I loved how the author included a lot of background information as well as conclusive data. It’s format was a little difficult for me to read and took a second to adjust to. Overall I think the writing style of the article was very informative, it gave the right amount of information. It provided a good balance between being statistical and being brief and so that it kept the readers attention without getting too technical. This article’s limited but skillful use of numbers was great in bringing about the importance of this new drug.

I felt as though the article included the molecular drawings because they were a key aspect of the research. Since it took nearly “five years” to come up with the exact structure, it is a proud show case of the researchers work. In addition, it could prove as a means of incentive for other researchers familiar with the drugs, but maybe with different names to conduct research as well.

An article like this might not be in the Times today due it’s detailed information on the research and scientific facts. Many articles today are brief, and in a sense click bait, intended to get the viewers attention. However, I find that more articles like this are needed, for the simple reason while it was lengthy, it was very informative. I actually enjoyed reading this article due to its balance of technical and relatively relevant information. The article kept the readers attention because of the things they could benefit from it while doing a very good job of relaying the hard scientific information that it took to get to these “benefits”.