I was very excited for this class because it is the first upper-level class I could take that dealt specifically with my field of interest, molecular biology. Though I didn't like some of how the class was organized, the material was very helpful for furthering my biology education. I thought the more in-depth biomechanics of cells would be my most significant takeaways, but while they were interesting and important, the information presented on the ways of analyzing research papers and methods were imperative for my ability to expand my knowledge on my own. As the quarter progressed, I found myself able to much more easily read a scientific paper and understand it to a fair degree, and this will hep as I enter research and must rely on this ability to excel.
One of our projects was to read a scientific paper and then condense the information and findings of it into one brief image called a "graphical abstract." The following is my graphical abstract for the paper titled, "Kinetochore-localized PP1-Sds22 couples chromosome segregation to polar relaxation" (PMID 26168397).