Done!

Besides maybe a few final tweaks to my machine diagram, I am finally finished my paper! the discussion part of writing it was easier than I had initially thought (and blogged). Once I wrote about the results and the side effects, it was simple to make the connection to how the system can be improved, while the usefulness of the system was obvious from the start, as my topic involved medical treatment of a disease. I added some figures at the end too, both to make it easier to explain certain subjects without taking up three paragraphs and to add some visual explanations, as some of the information I cite in the paper is much more interesting in picture or table form than stuck into a giant paragraph. The machine diagram actually required a lot of time and corrections, much more than I thought it would when I first started. First I made it too complicated, then too simple, then too wrong, and now I have to make sure I have covered the system completely while still remaining simple enough to qualify as a diagram and not just paragraphs with arrows between them, which was the problem I had in the first place. It's much easier to have a passing idea in your head about how something works than to really analyze it and reduce it down to the important properties and components. All in all, this paper was an interesting experience; it was much simpler to do research papers in high school when the topic was something as broad as Mark Twain or cardiovascular diseases. This was the first time I had to really focus on a very detailed system and analyze it fully, instead of reducing much of the information I obtained to generalizations on a broad topic. I think the design project will also be a stressful, terrifying, but enlightening experience because I don't recall ever having to do anything similar to it yet.

One Week Later

So my machine diagram was a tad on the way too detailed side but it wasn't too much of a problem to simplify them because the research that into writing the little details was still applicable to the part in the paper where you talk about the machine diagram in depth. I'm glad Dr. Bogen finally released the format of the research paper because I like having some sort of structure to base my writing off of, especially a mostly objective paper like this. I also changed my machine diagram to a circular diagram after someone pointed out that the mass transferred (the stem cells) were both being extracted from the patient and returned to the patient. I think it makes the machine diagram much more comprehensive and emphasizes the "autologous" part of this procedure that is one of the important aspects of this treatment. Anyway, after the I had a format to follow, the first few parts of my paper were relatively quick and easy; I just had to explain my diagram and make an overview. The hard part was the research and sifting through way too much information to find the useful bits. Now what's left is the discussion part, which is turning out to be fairly difficult because it's hard to organize my thoughts. This is the first major paper I've written in a long, long time that requires me to use writing skills so thoughts translate very slowly to paper.