2 Meetings Down

Yesterday, the 21st of November, was my second thesis committee meeting and it's a little hard to believe that we're already planning to look at the results and discussion sections at our next meeting. But before I get into the next steps, let's review what was discussed yesterday afternoon.

I began the meeting by getting any new pieces of feedback/suggestions from my committee as I had met with most of them in individual meetings prior to yesterday. Based upon the fact that all major concerns had been taken care of previously, my committee signed off on the experimental design section with the understanding that the document is still in its preliminary stages.

One of the suggestions brought up during this part of the meeting which stuck out to me was Mr. Finsel's point that it could be valuable, in terms of my ability to establish credence, to chronicle more of my process in landing on the final experimental design throughout my thesis. What I believe he meant by this is that the rationale behind certain changes I've made to the strains I'm using and how they will be utilized can help add worth to the protocol I'm proposing because it shows I made conscious and purposeful decisions based on what is most favorable for my experiment. The specific scenario would be when I'm talking about which strains of worms I'm using. Previously, I had landed on using one strain associated with Huntington's (glutamate) and another associated with Alzheimer's (amyloid-beta) so that my conclusions would have wider applications in neuroscience research. But later on, I discovered that our microscope can't differentiate between YFP (yellow fluorescence) and GFP (green fluorescence) meaning I wouldn't be able to tell the plaques apart from the glial cells in the glutamate strain, undoubtedly impacting the accuracy of the data I gather. This wasn't so much of an unsettling problem as it was a conscious choice to cut my losses and favor accuracy over having wider impact. But what Mr. Finsel suggested about this is that I include in my Materials and Methods section, my initial plan, how it was changed, and why it changed. I thought this was an interesting point because, for some reason, I've always felt like the final product ought to be super polished and chronicle what work was actually done successfully as opposed to journals where I can discuss my struggles and how I plan to deal with them. I guess though, that's not necessarily the case here. The biggest reason I didn't include that switch from the glutamate strain to the A-beta strain was because I thought it wasn't appropriate but my committee seems to think that it would actually add to my paper's value. As I reflect on that now, I think I agree with them but I know myself and how I write so I also think that I have to be careful and make sure that adding in this piece of the narrative does not confuse the reader or distract from the essence of what was actually used/done.

We also talked in this part of the meeting about validity vs. reliability. And since I've been working on clear communication, I'm going to say that I honestly don't understand the difference between the two. I almost feel like if one can establish substantial reliability, that should automatically mean the work is valid? I don't know, Mr. Finsel has tried to explain it to me in the past but I think I'm still confused on the distinction between the two. Besides this though, Dr. Norman brought with him Jocelyn's comments which were mostly nomenclature and clinical language suggestions along with some clarity concerns in a couple spots, but nothing major. So at that point, everybody signed the approval sheet for Materials and Methods, with the understanding, as I said before, that it is a living document.

Once that was finished, we started talking about the plan moving forward. Everyone seemed fairly comfortable with discussing and approving results/discussion at our next meeting which hopefully will be in the beginning of February (at the latest). Mrs. Martin definitely brought up a good point about this next group of sections when she talked about how it's important to think about what implications the results have and make sure that larger conclusion is communicated clearly and thoroughly throughout the discussion piece. This comment led us into talking about the literature review. So the literature review is something that will come out of my annotated bibliography which should be completed by the middle of next month. Oh also, we came to the general consensus that I should work more closely with Dr. Norman and Jocelyn on the literature review in the sense that they're professionals in the field so their stamp of approval is most important. For that reason, I don't believe we would need a whole meeting for the literature review as I would prefer we refined something more integral such as the methods and materials section rather than discuss something that can be taken care of in a smaller group than the whole committee.

Besides describing how the experimental process would look and giving everyone an idea of what I would be doing for the next couple of months, there wasn't really time for much else. Overall, I thought it was a solid meeting and while there're always more edits and more revisions to do, I think I'll be ready to move on from this preliminary draft right after Thanksgiving break during which I can work on the suggestions I received yesterday.

Before I end this reflection though, I want to briefly comment on the goal I had set for this meeting. If you recall from my November goal post, I mentioned communication quite extensively and how I truly felt a sense of urgency to become better at communicating my thoughts, particularly while I'm speaking. The meeting, obviously, was an important test of said skills. I don't know that I made a lot of progress in that area. Sometimes, it gets a little bit frustrating that I know what I want to say and I have a thought that I need to convey, but somewhere along the way, I am unable to speak effectively. I know this is something that needs a lot of practice which is why I'm glad I have the opportunity to hold these meetings and learn to communicate better. Although the status of this C's progress may change after I've completed my SDA and podcast, it's probably the most pressing concern I need to monitor out of the 5 Cs.

So the SDA which is the children's book on my worms' experimental process is forthcoming on the 1st of December. And as far as the podcast goes, I want to have a "draft" (my 1st attempt) also ready this next week. I'm not committing to a date just yet only because I'm not entirely sure what next week will look like but this break is definitely a good time to work on all of these things.

And lastly to anyone who is reading this post, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!