Hey
everyone,
As I
finish up my poster for CARE SEM SPUR and look at all the colorful graphs I’ve
compiled, it’s hard to tell that I’ve run into quite a few problems in the past
few weeks. I think I finished off my last blog excited to start a new phase in
my project, using a tool called the Read Origin Protocol to profile the immune
and microbial components of our unmapped reads. However, after successfully running
a script that executed the program on one sample, I tried running the same
script on all 32 samples. The next morning, I realized that all 32 jobs had
failed, and the program had essentially deleted itself. After waiting a couple
of days for one of my mentors to fix the bug, he ended up not knowing what was
wrong, and had me re-download the program. Somehow, this worked. This reminds
me of a joke I heard from my high school physics teacher: A mechanical
engineer, an electrical engineer, and a computer engineer go on a road trip.
The car breaks down and the mechanical engineer suspects that something is
wrong with the engine. The electrical engineer disagrees, and offers to take a
look at the electrical system. Finally the computer engineer interrupts and
says, “I have a better idea. Let’s all just get out of the car and get back
in.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only difficulty I ran into. Some problems
didn’t have quick and easy solutions, and remain unresolved. Although I still
don’t have all the results from ROP yet, it’s exciting to know that there is
plenty of analysis to look forward to in the near future!
Teia
Here are
some photos of moments throughout the summer contrasting from the stressful
experience I just described (They also serve as proof that I spent some time
away from my computer screen):
