Miss You, Bae: The Final Post

Hey readers!

Wow. I turned in my final paper on Thursday and delivered my final presentation on Friday evening, so this amazing journey has come to an end. For all my readers who couldn't make the presentation, here is the link to my slides. For you especially curious readers, here is the link to the PDF of my final paper. Thanks to everyone who stayed/came for my presentation... you guys are the best -- I felt so supported and happy to share my results with everyone!

Nailed the presentation like Iso Joe nailed that game-winner...

I'd be completely remiss to not give specific thanks to Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag for their amazing guidance and mentorship throughout my project. Dr. Herbots was the greatest expert advisor because she basically gave me autonomy in what kind of project I wanted to pursue, allowing me to combine the use of Ion Beam Analysis and 3LCAA to my heart's content. Yet, she provided with amazing guidance through all the steps, helping me in the lab, interpreting the results with me, and objectively judging the conclusions I made to help me strengthen them. She was truly an expert advisor, and I want to thank her for her amazing mentorship for the last 1.5 years!

Apart from being an amazing teacher and mentor, Mrs. Haag definitely gave me a lot of personal support throughout the grueling research process. For all the obstacles I faced with reducing the number of samples and semi-changing the experimental design, Mrs. Haag was always supportive and understanding, arming me with contingency plans and encouragement. I genuinely couldn't have done it without her!

Mrs. Haag = OG

On a more content-related level, the amazing way Mrs. Haag and AP Research helped me was ultimately in communicating my research. I'd been in the lab since the beginning of junior year, so I didn't need AP Research to get me started in research. BUT even though I had given poster and oral presentations and even written a published paper in junior year, I couldn't convey important aspects of my research in an understandable manner to everyone. I would either go way too technical and not reach the ultimate purpose or importance of the research, or simplify too much. Going through my project with Mrs. Haag -- thoroughly reviewing the literature on my own to nail the terminology down, planning my own experimental design, writing a proposal, and explaining my project to her -- really helped me get the importance of my research project and allowed me to easily convey the significance. 

What this manifested in was not just my own personal satisfaction of being able to communicate my research effectively (oh, don't worry that was huge), but also lots of accolades I wouldn't have otherwise won. So, in October, I got the best oral presentation at the American Physical Society meeting basically just because I had just done a lit review and explained all of my research to Mrs. Haag (also Seminar slide tips). I could convey my information clearly and understandably. AP Research also allowed me to convey the significance of my research conversationally -- I felt it really helped for interviews for colleges and talking to adults about my research.

Moreover, I was able to author another paper on the research I did for my research project, and we're submitting that for publication later this month. This Tuesday, I'm presenting a poster at the Materials Research Society meeting, with basically data entirely from my AP Research project. So, AP Research let me conduct real, interesting, and ground-breaking science but also understand it extremely well to communicate it to others. And that's pretty powerful.

As Dr. Jette said, it's all about power.

Both AP Research and AP Seminar definitely forced me to confront my fear of writing (lol... it's true). Before Seminar, I used to get super nervous about writing anything, so I would never start English assignments until the last minute. The rigorous planning that we conduct and the outlining we do made that job so much easier, and now I honestly take pride in my writing and love it. In college, I'm going to have to write a lot, so that was extremely helpful. Moreover, I learned to formulate an argument in a paper, which really really really helped me out in writing scientific papers. Because of these skills (which I DEFINITELY wouldn't have without Seminar), I could first-author a paper in a scientific journal in junior year.

So, I really owe a lot of stuff to AP Capstone and Mrs. Haag, and I will definitely continue to use the skills I gained in the program to understand and communicate research with writing or speaking. 

Well, that basically raps this year up... I can't even believe it. For all you readers that have been following for a while now, you're the best... I hope you enjoyed the wild ride we've been on... 

I've genuinely gave the last two years of AP Capstone my best, and it's the greatest feeling!

Signing off for the last time,

Yash-ip out <3

Miss you baes!

Yash

(845)

Sick Presentations!

*Nasal-y voice*

Hey readers!

So, last week, I came down with some crazy congestion/illness which severely altered my voice and gave me some headaches. But, not to fear, it's crunch-time, so I kept plugging through it. I gave 2 practice presentations last week, one on Tuesday and one on Saturday.

Literally, how I looked after blowing my nose all day and not sleeping.

For Tuesday, I started out on fire 🔥 , but then following an infamous drop of the clicker (ask Mrs. Haag -- it shattered into exactly 1,000,000 pieces), things went off the rails a bit. It wasn't the clicker, but the organization of my presentation that caused the issues. As I referenced last week, I simply broke my slides up into 3LCAA and Ion Beam Analysis. By splitting by analysis technique, I was trying to minimize repeated explanations of the same methods and stick to chronology. 

However, the transitions between the experiment and the analysis of the results were lacking, causing me to lose my wonderful audience of Dr. Scaling, Mr. Lester, Ms. Conner, and Mrs. Haag. Moreover, I was discussing implications right with the data, and I didn't have broader conclusions at the end of each section, so my audience couldn't keep track of all the conclusions I was making until I showed them my last few slides. Like most issues with explanations of my project that happened this year (let's get reflective one week early), it stemmed from my complete immersion in my project and the data, which a normal person couldn't understand from my explanations. For a greater understanding of my results and to hit all those points on the rubric, I needed to connect my results to their significance more (e.g., IBA spectra and overlays to UNIFORMITY).

It's never good when your audience looks like this when you're presenting data.

As you can imagine, making such amateur mistakes was frustrating, so I had to go back to the drawing board. 

Rip.

Going into Saturday, I needed a real re-organization and re-framing of the Methods --> Results --> Discussion sections. After talking to Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag, I decided to frame my entire research with 3 questions, and then divide my presentation into 3 sections based on these questions (It's "HemaDrop™ It Like It's Hot" after all, I couldn't give you a blog post without some technical information 😉 ):

1. Can hyper-hydrophilic coatings dry a blood droplet quickly into thin solid films? (Optical Observations)

2. If so, are the blood thin solid films created uniform in composition? (Ion Beam Analysis)

3. If so, what parameters optimize hyper-hydrophilicity to maximize uniformity and feasibility? (3LCAA)

Based on these questions, the clear goal of each experiment is articulated before, and I answer each question after each section. This organization worked much better, and my presentation on Saturday was much improved (only 2 minutes over and way clearer). 

RIP 3LCAA table (I took out a wildly confusing and variously colored table of values lol). You had a good run, but ultimately, my bar graph conveyed all the information you said and more. If you want to see the infamous table, you can read my paper!

However, there is still work to be done! Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag both stated that they wanted a clearer connection to implications when I present data, so I have been working on putting in graphics, which appear as talk connecting specific aspects of the results to the implications for answering the questions. Moreover, I need to transition better between the research questions, as Mrs. Haag said that it was really clear within each section, but why we could move on to each new one was confusing. I anticipate adding a better transition slide between sections.

Practicing has been going well, as it has allowed me to try out different types of slides and make changes. But I think I've established the best organization for my presentation, so most slide-editing should end by Monday. Then, I can hone in on my delivery, which has been pretty good and natural so far. 

Interestingly, Dr. Herbots loved the new organization so much that she suggested changing my paper to fit this organization, which has really helped my word count. I am close to 5500 words now, and still can streamline a few more sections. Monday and Tuesday are major crunch-times for cutting my paper and making sure it's my best work. 

Last week! And I think we're in pretty good shape.

As an FYI, my final presentation is THIS Friday (!), which is April 14, from 6 - 6:30 pm, so, as a loyal reader, you're invited to hear me talk about what I've done this year and some cool results.

FRIDAY NIGHT!

Please!

See you there!

Yash

(767) 

🔑 🚨

Making the Real Ideal

Hey readers!

Well, only 11 days until "The Final Upload" (aka the reckoning) and 12 until "The Presentation" (aka the end)... what does this mean? This means that we're touching up our papers, optimizing our PowerPoints, and rehearsing our presentations. It also means this is probably one of the last 3 entries I'll post -- it's been a great year, and I'm definitely intend on finishing strong.

This has no relevance, but I saw it when I searched "finish strong," and I'm still so shook...
In this gif, my research project is diarrhea, but it's way too fun to be that.

Last week, I went into ASU to meet with Barry Wilkens, the OG lab manager and resident RBS/PIXE guru at IBeAM, where he showed me some cool tricks with RUMP (a program used to analyze RBS data).

Here's a screenshot of the RUMP command line (requires some bare-bones coding)...
the creator in the 1980s was a troll, as you can see by the prompts (in white).

With Barry's help on the RBS and PIXE, I could obtain the percent composition for each element in the BSS Saline we analyzed... this is my final result! I compared this value to the percent compositions for elements in the characterized Saline solution (on the bottle), and we got some really new interesting results to add to my paper.

About that paper -- I'm still cutting that down, but I have been working on revamping the methods to align better with my project and not provide so much needless detail. But, I know what y'all really care about... current total: 5,800. So, getting there.

Just trust the process...

Regarding my presentation, I was pretty happy with my slides going into my meeting with Mrs. Haag, but afterward, I realized that I have a lot of work to do. One misconception I had when I made my slides was that I wanted to minimize the number of slides I had to below 30. For scientific presentations in the past, I had done this, but since the AP Research presentation (and all for that matter) should be really engaging, I scrapped this semi-arbitrary limit and made many many slides. From my practice so far, changing the slides regularly (as opposed to ~ 1 min/slide) gives me a lot of momentum and confidence, so that's nice. I have fixed this in my presentation.

Keepin' things fast-paced to keep the audience engaged is the name of the game

Moreover, another mistake I always make is trying to cram a lot onto 1 slide. With the new fast-paced approach, I can separate a lot of slides into 2. While I did have a good amount of SmartArt that made my presentation look clean and animations to make points, I increased the use of animation and reduced the plain words in my talk.

They don't want us to use animations to fulfill a purpose, so we gotta...

So -- the ideal presentation ultimately matches form to function... all animations contribute to the understanding of the material and nothing is extraneous. Moreover, words are minimized on the slides other than key points, so that key points are reinforced but the audience is not distracted from the speaker. Additionally, the pace should be quick, but the articulation of the ideas should be clear and measured. 

One example of a great slide was on Ved's presentation where he had the information we wanted to garner (the gap from the lit review) and the methods used to get that information (with arrows), so I'm lowkey (well, high key now) going to steal that slide, and use that idea throughout. Also, an ideal presentation should not jump around to save time and improve the reader's understanding. So, I decided I will split my ppt not by methods, results, and discussion, but into sections of experiments (i.e., 3LCAA and RBS). The main reason for this is that I was basically explaining lots of information twice when I talked about the method and then the results. So, now I minimize repetition, and the presentation should be easier to follow. 

So, the main takeaway is FORM --> FUNCTION... and keep related things connected.

While I used a lot of Seminar tips, I personally did not love that style of presentation, especially with my technical project. But, a purely scientific presentation with no aesthetic is also boring and not how most research presentations are, so I am finding the happy medium. A major tip I took from Seminar is using graphics and pictures effectively. My old presentations were trash, with no aesthetic and no form matching function, so I am really excited to use this presentation, especially because I am going to give a similar talk at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting at Phx Convention Center on April 18. 

To practice for both, my plan is to do a presentation before I eat anything. This way, I can minimize the snacking I do and practice a bunch. I will at least get to practice 3 times a day, and if I am going out for lunch, I will practice before I leave. I don't want to do any more, since I would need time in between to refine my presentation and script, especially at first. 

I anticipate having ample practice, especially because my lab crew (Dr. Herbots and co) also want me to practice for them. Rehearsing is important, especially with the amount of slide changes I have to do now.

Well, that's it for this week -- stay posted! It's getting heated -- final 2 weeks! 

Major 🔑  🚨 ,

Yash

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It's All in the Presentation

Hey readers!

It's been a really productive and fun week -- I edited others' papers, reduced the number of words in my paper, finished up making the final figures, created a first draft of my presentation and script, and visited my family in Memphis!

Savage meme, but I enjoyed my time in Memphis, especially eating Muddy's cupcakes with my cousins!

We started the week barely finishing my gargantuan paper, which weighed in at 8000 words and slowly was trimmed to less 6000 words! Thanks to Mrs. Haag for meeting with me repeatedly to trim the excess words. I think another few read-throughs tomorrow and Tuesday will put me within reach of the 5000 word limit. I'm particularly looking at the results section and methods section for cutting.

Salt bae -- more like adding 1k words oops... 

At the same time, I worked on creating a compelling presentation from my paper. I actually had a presentation that I had delivered at the American Physical Society Fall 2016 Meeting, which won an award for Best Talk. BUT THAT POWERPOINT WAS TRASH... Such a realization was one of those moments where you realize how much you've grown in AP Research. Having done so much on my own for this project, I have a new understanding of my research, so I thought of much better ways of conveying my information (not to mention replacing my barf-yellow background with a 1/cos(c) blood presentation template...). 

Oh yeah...

I focused on showing my research process and using animations/pictures/screenshots to take the audience as close to the research I conducted as possible. Specifically, I was particularly proud of my animation to show the ellipse-fitting in 3LCAA (let me know what you think). One thing I was wondering was, since I have basically 4 separate experiments -- what do you guys think of intermixing methods and results? As in, going experiment by experiment. I think that might provide some more continuity than I currently have and emphasize the research process, but I did want to stay consistent with the rubric. What do you think?

Talking about the rubric -- here's how I thought it broke down...

Row 1 is basically ensuring you are following a robust research process, by using the literature review to find the gap, employing the best methods to research this gap, and then drawing correct conclusions from your gap. I tried to make my gap, question, methods, and conclusions really apparent with their own slides here.

Row 2 is assessing the progression of your research from results to discussion to conclusion-- taking the data you took, realizing what it says, interpreting it into conclusions, and then stating the implications and importance of the conclusions (WITH GOOD EVIDENCE). I think that combining the results and discussion in my paper and presentation will give me a good start here. In my presentation, I will need to make sure to tie conclusions back to the data I collected though, as it can be easy to just rattle off some cool conclusions without support in the interest of time.

Row 3 examines if your hypothesis was rejected or accepted, how so, and why... Again, evidence is key, except this time linking findings from the Lit Review to the Discussion is key 🔑.  I focus on this point with hyper-hydrophilicity theory compared to the 3LCAA and RBS data we analyzed.

Row 4 assesses the quality of your visual aids and your presentation style. I tried to integrate lots of animations, diagrams, and explanations of apparatuses to keep the audience engaged. Moreover, I aligned my script to correspond to these animations, which will really allow me to excel here. My slides are a bit busy, but the nature of my project requires a graphs/tables with explanations and annotations.

Rows 5-7 evaluate the oral presentation. Based on the discussion I had in my meeting with Mrs. Haag, I know that in Rows 6 and 7 I need to emphasize the adaptations I had to do to finish my project, including performing analysis on a variety of fluids due to issues with human blood. Moreover, my research is extremely iterative, as I used 3LCAA to determine which samples to test with RBS. Such parts of the process are really important to emphasize. Such a response is crucial for Row 5, where I am asked to justify my choices. Overall, I need to use my slides and always point back to sources and data in my answers. Then, I should be good.

The plan for this week is to continue finessing my paper, perfect my presentation/script and start practicing, submit my final abstract, prep some oral defense questions, and work with my blog group... busy times ahead!

Always, though, we gotta remember to HemaDrop It Like It's Hot...

Cheers,

Yash

(796)

Feeding Back the Feedback: Paper-Writing and Updates

Hey readers!

This week was filled with some great progress, especially in articulating my research. As you may know, this blog become award-winning, courtesy of Mrs. Haag. Additionally, I became a finalist at Arizona’s Junior Science and Humanities Symposium for my oral presentation… unfortunately, I didn’t win though, but it was fantastic practice for my presentation, as I got to present a lot of my data in a twelve-minute presentation! I’m super excited for April 14^th, as I realized how fun oral presentations are.

Anotha oral presentation ... Major ket alert 🔑🚨

When I wasn’t working on my presentation or presenting, I was working on data analysis, which is essentially done now. The data analysis involved extracting the elemental composition from the RBS spectra we collected on saline. The power of these results is that, unlike canine blood or human blood, which have unknown exact compositions, we know the concentration of elements in saline. In this way, even though we didn’t plan on using saline, it has been really advantageous, because I am working on converting the elemental counts to concentrations. How this works is you have the number of atoms for certain elements. Then, you divide by Avagadro’s number to determine the number of moles of an element. Convert the moles into mass by multiplying by molar mass. Then, by dividing the mass by the volume (which we know because we applied the drops with a controlled-volume mechanical pipette), we can compare the concentration in the drop to the true concentration in the bottle. So, that’s a look at how I have been performing analysis… now to the main content of the post: the feedback on my paper and my preparation for the presentation.

By looking at most of my group members’ feedback (Thank you Gursajan and Ashwath!),

Get some rest, guys... I got us!! I love you! 

I was able to figure out the main problems with my paper:

First off, I found some key places to cut words in the literature review, including some repeated definitions (e.g., hydrophilicity), awkward transitions (e.g., properties of blood), and repeated parts about the mechanism of hyper-hydrophilic films acting on blood.

Although the methods were extensive and detailed, Ashwath made a point that I often explain concepts and techniques inaccessible to a lay person with slightly less esoteric jargon (but still esoteric). For these ideas, like Ion Beam Analysis, RBS, RBS data analysis, and even capillary sampling, I think that focusing on the input and output – only providing enough information for my reader to understand why I use it and what results it provides – is a good strategy to avoid wasting words and confusing the reader further. I was trying to get the reader to understand everything about every word in my project, but taking a more pragmatic approach to make sure the reader understands the concepts in relation to my research, but maybe not understand everything about all techniques and words (e.g., contact angle, RBS, damage curves, incident angle, rubefacient, etc). Because, after all, word count is a thing. I need to achieve this balance of explanations and providing just enough information to understand my results and project. I do need to expand on what certain concepts, like surface energy, are though…

My discussion section has negative energy right now... let's correct that!

Since results and discussions are usually together, Mrs. Haag and I decided to combine my results and discussion sections to save worda and prevent detached or repetitive explanations across the sections. Then, I will have a smaller conclusion section. In my discussion section for feedback from my group, I was just figuring out what my results meant myself, so the readability of the section suffered. It was too long, and I assumed a great deal of knowledge from the introduction. The alignment between the methods and the results also just wasn’t there. I’ve been focusing on re-writing my discussion into LaTeX and adding connections to my Lit Review and Methods, especially with me understanding my results much more now. I had to rewrite/re-portray much of the RBS data because of the amount of knowledge I assumed. Adding the new section of data should not take too many words, as it is just a derivative/expansion upon what I did earlier with the accuracy calculations. I am working on this section still, but it will be ready for my day in the peer edit group.

My conclusions are pretty solid, as I know the specific limitations of my experiment including the inability to perform RBS on all samples including the Si wafers, using different fluids, and lack of coating uniformity. Moreover, the uniformity of blood films on HemaDrop in this study demonstrates that future directions with other techniques apart from RBS are promising and necessary to detect molecules. This part of my paper was not ready for feedback in the last round, so if my groupmates could focus a bit on this too, I’d really appreciate it (especially the justifications of the limitations)!

Classic Khaled here...

Regarding the grading rubric, I believe this is how it break down right now:

Row 1: My literature review is pretty strong in conveying the significance of my research and creating a specific niche for my project. Moreover, there is a clear gap that my research fills both in the academic conversation of thin films, but also in clinically for blood testing. However, one aspect I should improve on (and you guys could look out for) is integrating this purpose and niche throughout my paper with my results. Such connections were lacking from my last draft, and I tried to add those.

Row 2: My sources do interact in conversation, but some of this interaction is lost due to the novel nature of my project. Particularly, the connection between hyper-hydrophilic films and thin films theory to blood testing needs to be clearer. I tried to articulate this well, but this could be a weakness for me. I do show the significance of each study to my research, and the reasoning in my literature review follows.

Row 3: All of my sources are academic papers or textbooks, so credibility is not an issue. I do need to make sure that I convince the reader of the relevance of the study with more information on the methodology of some studies. I tried to do so, but I also did not want to use up too much space, so please check for succinctness in these assessments.

Row 4: I think I nailed this explanation by demonstrating the importance of uniformity and describing how to calculate uniformity from the first paragraph of my methods section. Moreover, a quantitative method with qualitative observations is undoubtedly the best method for my research’s goal.

Row 5: My results are expanded upon, and I provide important and logical implications of both quantitative data and qualitative observations. However, what is missing here is the connection of the findings to something understandable to a lay audience. Please identify sections disjointed from the methods and non-understandable to you. The main problem areas are the 3LCAA data and the saline uniformity calculations.

Row 6: I think my discussion section is the weakest of my paper, so this is a row I need to work on. Finding important places to integrate clinical significance from my literature review would really improve readability and increase significance. I was pleased with my ability to interpret the graphs and providence evidence for claims due to the immersion I had in my research and how much I learned. However, if you do not understand a result interpretation or explanation (e.g., which sample had the highest electron acceptor energy), please let me know, because this part is extremely weak.

Row 7: My figures can be a little scattered and filled with information, but both Gursajan and Ashwath liked my subtitles and captions. I also provide both tables and graphs for RBS data, which is quite intuitive for the reader. I am happy with my figures, but if you see a better way of portraying data or plots, I’m all ears.

Row 8: LaTeX has my back on citations lol… I think I do a good job of integrating quotes while also paraphrasing. It is clear where these occur respectively, so I like this row.

Row 9: My vocabulary is precise, but terms like surface energy and Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry need to be defined in more simplistic terms. The terms I used are not enough for a lay audience to understand. I tried to fix most of this, but please look out especially for this, as I cut some words.

OF COURSE, please help me cut down words. That’s always a problem…

For my presentation, I’m pumped! I have a lot of practice articulating the significance of my research, but the weaker part of my presentation will be explaining the data in an understandable way while staying without losing the reader. In this way, I may have to choose specific data that I want to show and interpret well instead of just swamping the audience with data. I did this for JSHS, only presenting the human blood RBS data. Stylistically, my presentations are usually boring, and I have a problem with repeated hand movements, so I will need to focus on varying that. I really love hearing myself talk, and talking about HemaDrop, so the oral presentation should be lit.

We're getting there -- we're climbing!

Phew – lots of words, for lots of research... let's go!!

Cheers,

Yash

(1550)

RBS: Really Big Stuff

Hey readers!

It's been a crazy week, like always! Right now, we've basically finished the final experiment that I needed to have a complete set of data to answer my question. So, this week has been packed with 3 stages of research simultaneously: data collection, data analysis, and writing.

If you remember, at the beginning of my data collection stage, we were unable to do RBS (Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry) on human blood. However, since performing RBS and determining elemental composition of 2 different spots is crucial, I still collected as much data as I could using Balanced Saline Solution (which mimics intraocular humor, so it's a complex ionic solution like blood). On Thursday, we had a marathon 10 hour continuous RBS session to take a bunch of data. RBS is super awesome, so even though this post is about my paper, I wanted to show you guys some really cool pictures of samples:

Here's the organization system I created for my samples  with a $1.50 box from Joann Fabrics!
Each compartment has a 8 mm x 8 mm sample wrapped in a cellulose wipe, to prevent contamination.

Here is a sample in the vacuum chamber on the sample holder.
The laser beam shows where the ion beam will hit the sample!

Do you see that purple light?
That is the sample (an insulator) fluorescing when the ion beam hits it.

Since Thursday, I've been working as hard as I can to finish analyzing this new data, with 46 runs of 100,000 counts (ions) each to analyze. I calibrated the energies, and now I am looking at the data to overlay spectra and calculate elemental composition (uniformity). It will be done by tonight.

The data has been extremely interesting so far, and I have a lot to add to my results/discussion section about it. We took the approach of finding the composition of a bare slide, a slide with coating, and a slide with coating and a saline drop applied. 

Check out this cool plot overlaying 100k to 400k ions hitting 2 drops on the same sample! The "steps" represent elements' compositions (e.g., K, Ca, Na, and Si)

Visually, we can see that the compositions are similar across 8 spectra, especially in the overlay.
But, don't worry, I have quantitative calculations of uniformity as well.

It's really liberating to have this data finally, as I have had the opportunity to analyze data continuously without waiting on anything. 

Now that we've talked about where I am on data collection/analysis and what I've been up to, let's hone in on the paper!

Actually it's due tonight...

Since I am still analyzing some data, some of my results sections and discussion sections still need to be written up, since I need to fill in some numbers and draw a few more conclusions from the new analysis I have been working on. However, they will be completed within the next few days, in time for my editing spot on Thursday. 

So far, I am really happy with the robust dataset I have collected. I have 3 parts of my results, including (i) 3LCAA data on the surface energy of my samples, (ii) qualitative image analysis of saline drops, (iii) Ion Beam Analysis of canine blood, human blood, and saline. I think that the amount of data and analysis I have done really answers my question and can lead my reader through logically why I decided to use this three-pronged approach. Of course, lots of data means I have a lot to talk about in all of my sections. 

Let's just say this isn't big data, but the data sure is BIG ;)

Apart from being happy with the data I collected, I think that the connection between my methods and results section is really strong, specifically how I describe my data analysis. When I edited my paper at the beginning of the first trimester, I focused on aligning these parts very well and connecting the importance of uniformity in a clinical setting to the data in my experiment.  

Now, for the weaknesses and what to look for... 

Always word count.

Since my paper is already above the word limit without the new data, I definitely need to figure out sections or parts that are dispensable. Anything that can be made shorter would be greatly appreciated.

Moreover, I think that something I really need to be strong are the transitions between the results sections and justifications of looking at specific samples. In the beginning of the project, I set ambitious goals and planned a huge experiment. However, we encountered some obstacles, so my actual experiment did collect a bit less data. Therefore, I want to make sure that as a reader, the justifications of only performing RBS on certain samples is robust enough (apart from the weak, hey, I couldn't). I think using the previous 3LCAA data as a way to narrow down and select specific samples to RBS was a solid approach though. 

The transitions better be good, but not too explicit either...

Next, I think that identifying any extraneous information in the Lit Review or Methods that doesn't perfectly align with the slightly modified experiments I performed would be a major key 🔑  in cutting down my paper.

Finally, I wanted to make sure that I connected my research to the applications clearly in the discussion (e.g., implementing HemaDrop as a technology), as that is ultimately the significance of my research and will make my project more focused and digestible for all.

I tried to break up the dense post with some dank memes, so hope you enjoyed!

Entering the homestretch, so let's goooo!

Yash 🦁

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