BIOL398-04/S15:Class Journal Week 2

Lauren M. Magee

What was the purpose of this assignment?

What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you?

What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you?

What (yet) do you not understand?

What was the purpose of this assignment?
- This assignment is a precursor to what we will be doing for the rest of the semester. We will have to read different articles and journals as a class and on our own. By doing this together, we can discuss what we learned, see how interpreted the work, and better our skills for reading scientific articles and journals. Plus, by reading this articles, we can also learn lessons which will help us improve our own scientific writing skills.
What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you?
- The terms were not too difficult to understand for me. Just having taken Cell Function, some of the proteins and enzymes mentioned were very familiar such as NADPH and GDH. Plus, cell function looked at various pathways and how they are interconnected, and I could follow the concepts in this article.
What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging to you?
- For me, trying to summarize the article in my own words was more difficult. As a person who has had to read a lot of scientific papers, the language is something that you get used to; however, in summarizing the results and methods, it is hard to explain in laymen's terms.
What (yet) do you not understand?
- I am having trouble understanding specifically what each gene had to do with yeast and how its activity affected the overall organism.

Natalie Williams 16:42, 26 January 2015 (EST)

The purpose of this assignment was to become comfortable reading and understanding scientific papers. Being able to comprehend scientific papers is an important skill to have for scientists and mathematicians, because research involves discussion with peers as well as drawing on papers of the same topic.
The aspect of this assignment that came most easily to me was reading the scientific jargon. I am becoming increasingly more comfortable reading scientific papers, even though the language used in the papers can make reading them unnecessarily difficult.
The aspect of this assignment that was most challenging to me was summarizing the paper. It was such a short paper that ever sentence seemed important and I had trouble focusing my outline.
I am still having trouble understanding the importance of each gene. There were a lot of different genes mention in the paper that were important enough to label, but I am having trouble understanding the function of each of the genes mentioned.

Tessa A. Morris 01:28, 26 January 2015 (EST)

The purpose of this assignment was to help us create and refine critical skills for reading scientific articles. For the rest of the class, we will be reading and analyzing articles such as these, so this article was an introduction to that. It is important for us to strengthen these skills in order to be able to crticially think about the topic presented, the findings, and the conclusion as we will likely have to sift through many articles such as this one for the rest of our scientific careers.
Creating and defining a list of unknown words was the easiest aspect for me. I felt like I knew a good amount of the words in this article, and could have used context clues for the ones that I did not. However, by making a list and defining them, it ensured that I truly was understanding the words and not blindly believing something that I was remembering incorrectly.
Understanding and sifting through the dense article overall was the most difficult part for me. I do not have a ton of experience reading scientific journals, only a few for chemistry and psychology. So being able to sift through the jargon, the wording, the acronyms and different numbers was difficult the first time I read through it. This also applied to the figures. It is relatively easy to read figures and their explanations, but not so easy to understand how it applies to the article if it's hard to understand the article.