#honours project

Protagonist Mood Board II.

Sketchbook pages of the character design of Geillis Duncan, the youngest of the three women I talk about in my comic and the first to be accused of witchcraft in the North Berwick witch trials. 

There’s not as many pages as Barbara Napier because I’m a lot happier with the designs I came up with here and also because I had more trouble trying to find a good design for Barbara that showed her age well. 

Backlog: 09 June 2021 ❄ Ya girl finally finished coding one game of [redacted sport]!!!

After a week of coding, I finally finished coding a whole game of [redacted sport]! :') 80 minutes, 1252 rows of data... data analysis is gonna be fun 🙃 Little wins, folks! Little wins...

Here it is, as promised! I’ll be making daily updates about my project here! Check it out if you wanna! ;)

https://wulf-and-eadwacer-project.tumblr.com/

Finally, the sea anemone saga comes to a thrilling conclusion. I submitted my thesis, wrapped up my exams, and graduation is only two weeks away. After spending almost three years of my life obsessing over sea anemones and gushing about toxins, being the 'anemone girl' in my lab became a part of my identity. If I had to compare my research project trilogy with a film trilogy, then I would go with The Dark Knight Trilogy because in my final year project I fell into a giant pit and had to drag myself out.

My FYP was a sequel to my second research project. I had identified potential potassium channel toxins in my second project, so the next was step was synthesizing and purifying the toxins for structural and functional characterization. Throughout my FYP, the actual approach and direction for my project kept changing because I was struggling to synthesize my toxins. The original idea was: make the toxin and find the disulfide linkages. That idea was transformed into: keep trying to make the toxin while predicting the structure and do CD once the toxin was produced. That idea was changed to: just predict everything and hope that you get something at the end.

After my first synthesis, I spent my lot of time trying to purify the toxin but then one my lab mates pointed out the horrifying possibility the peptide with the right mass wasn't even the crude sample. So I had to go back to the drawing board and figure out why my peptide wasn't there. A lot of times as an undergrad, you can fall into the trap of clinging onto a technique or approach while, believing that if you try just one more time, it could finally work. That's how you can end up wasting time pursuing a dead end. You have to be honest with yourself about your project and admit when something isn't working, even if you poured hours into your experiments and thesis. I have lost track of the number of times I scrapped things from my thesis.

For some bizarre reason, I couldn't synthesize my peptide. Even when we sent the sequences to a company which specializes in peptide synthesis, they were also having problems making the damn thing. Obviously, my toxins were cursed. I tried multiple strategies to synthesize my peptide, and through the process of trial and error; I ended up gaining a more in-depth understanding of peptide synthesis. Had I gotten my peptide in the first try I don't think I would have learned as much.

Half through the second act of my project, I realized there wasn't enough time to find the disulfide linkages experimentally. That's when I ended up expanding the Bioinformatics section of my thesis. I had taken only taken one Bioinformatics course as an undergrad, so it was kind of out of my comfort zone. By the time I had to start writing the first draft, I had lost track of the plot of my movie because I had tried so many different things. I just sat down one day and made a flow chart of all the experiments I did. There it was, a clear narrative which I could use to structure my thesis. Storytelling has always been a tool that I have used to make sense of my life and identity, but this is the first time I used storytelling to make sense of a research project.

Every undergrad and grad student's worst nightmare is that their research project isn't going anywhere. Sometimes you'll spiral into an existential crisis as you stare at mass spectra data and question your own sanity and competence. I think it is easy to fall into the trap of tying your sense of self-esteem to your results. After that, every single failure slowly destroys your confidence, motivation, and passion for the project. Once you lose your motivation, it becomes even harder to solve problems. The phrase: "What am I going to put in my thesis?" haunted me through my project. Here's the thing,  even if your results are less than ideal or you weren't able to synthesize something, you still have a story to tell. You can use that story to convey what you have learned and what makes the 'character' or 'theme' that focusing on in your project special.

One of the main challenges of doing research is that you have to deal with failure and uncertainty—a lot. We strive to be as objective and rational as possible, but ultimately, we are flawed humans who are limited by our perception, biases, and experiences. Even if you executed every experiment perfectly, there are factors beyond your control, which impact the results.  Research papers are cyclical in a way because they start out by tackling a gap in our knowledge and towards the end, they point out another gap in our understanding in the future work section. There is an existential element to doing research. We are living an indifferent and complex universe, without a cosmic mentor figure who can give us all of the answers.

11th May 2021:

Today I attended the Creative Careers Conference, held by my uni. While this is not directly related to my project, I thought it would be a good chance to get industry insight and, sigh, n e t w o r k.

Anyway, I met a lot of cool people, including some people that have worked for Dark Horse, Marvel, Ubisoft (apparently an awful place to work), Disney, and Monkey Stack to name a few. They gave some excellent. Here are some key takeaways if anyone is interested:

When trying to break into the industry, you should:

Never be an asshole (this was repeated a lot!)

Be resilient and don’t let rejections get to you (many said they had experienced hundreds of rejections before breaking in)

Be okay with working your way up (mail-room and runner jobs are great starting points)

Be persistent

Take an interest in the work of other professionals’ work, i.e. don’t just try to peddle your work to them! Don’t be that guy who meets an industry professional then sucks up 20 minutes of their time talking about your work and asking if they can get your work into the industry. Actually appreciate their work -- it will leave a much better impression. People and the industry is small. People remember first impressions.