3 ms·

Cool tool! It brings back memories: one of my favourite high level undergraduate course finals involved being given some instructions, printouts of sequence/pr

by zeagle 2y ago

Cool tool! It brings back memories: one of my favourite high level undergraduate course finals involved being given some instructions, printouts of sequence/primers/enzymes cleavage sites/other plasmids and a rough list of my resources and told to make a specific product. The exam was long answer essay writing out step by step instructions with rationale. I did the whole thing and double checking realized I misread an initial sequence in the first few steps making the whole thing void and probably more or less difficult than intended. I added an oh shit disclaimer in my solution. The prof, a researcher, to his immense credit presumably took off some points but the point of the exercise was testing a skillset and I did excellent in the course. Basically how higher education should be and night and day difference from 1000/2000 level courses!

dekhn 2y ago
In college, I took one lab course different from all the others after a senior told me it was life changing. In this lab the class was broken into teams and you were handed a smelly pile of bacteria. You were told the species and then had to read the literature, to learn how to purify specific restriction endonuclease (an enzyme that cuts DNA at a specific location based on its sequence). You were given access to basic molecular biology lab equipment. At the end, each group shared its RE and everybody used everybody's RE to map a plasmid. This is 1970s state of the art, but by the 90s was pretty much routine. The class kicked my ass. I struggled at every step and barely managed to reach the end. Lab work is quite hard and it can be challenging to master the techniques. A coworker was moved to tears during a challenging step involving a purification using a membrane bag, but reasoned that since tears are salty, they probably helped the purification when they landed in the solvent. I passed, but barely, and it took me ages to learn even the basics of doing stuff in the lb. it's one of the things that convinced me robots will do a better job in the lab than any human, although in retrospect, it's actually quite hard to build a robot that's better than an average lab tech.
colechristensen 2y ago
I had a few professors who would actually give full points in these situations because knowing that you’re wrong is often way more important than being right. If you went through a process mostly correctly and then identified that you were wrong and explained it well enough you got nothing taken away.

by zeagle 2y ago

dekhn 2y ago

In college, I took one lab course different from all the others after a senior told me it was life changing. In this lab the class was broken into teams and you were handed a smelly pile of bacteria. You were told the species and then had to read the literature, to learn how to purify specific restriction endonuclease (an enzyme that cuts DNA at a specific location based on its sequence). You were given access to basic molecular biology lab equipment. At the end, each group shared its RE and everybody used everybody's RE to map a plasmid. This is 1970s state of the art, but by the 90s was pretty much routine. The class kicked my ass. I struggled at every step and barely managed to reach the end. Lab work is quite hard and it can be challenging to master the techniques. A coworker was moved to tears during a challenging step involving a purification using a membrane bag, but reasoned that since tears are salty, they probably helped the purification when they landed in the solvent. I passed, but barely, and it took me ages to learn even the basics of doing stuff in the lb. it's one of the things that convinced me robots will do a better job in the lab than any human, although in retrospect, it's actually quite hard to build a robot that's better than an average lab tech.

colechristensen 2y ago

I had a few professors who would actually give full points in these situations because knowing that you’re wrong is often way more important than being right. If you went through a process mostly correctly and then identified that you were wrong and explained it well enough you got nothing taken away.