For this page I decided to pick two very different artifacts. The first paper was a lab report from Biology 121 which I took when I was still a nursing major. It was meant to be a basic biology course for a number of different majors including nursing and biology. The lab report was about photosynthesis which is a basic topic in biology that introductory courses included in the curriculum. Looking back at this paper now I see so many formatting errors, organization issues, and too much “fluff”. Lab reports should not be such an elaborate story like you would write for English class. It is precise and down to the point but described in much detail. Then again, it was a class mainly full of nursing majors and the guidelines were not very strict for this lab report.
The second artifact is a recently report from my modern genetics class from fall 2018. It was a very specific paper explaining how to sequence a genome through the computer program, Linux. It was a highly complicated project which took weeks of coding and running multiple tests to sequence the raw data, clean it up (quality control), assembly it, and annotate it. It was very frustrating at times because the tests would sometimes not work because of human error or the system would glitch causing errors or no results at all. Writing the paper was also a challenge because we had to explain how to perform these tests in detail but not make it sounds like a full-blown tutorial.
These two artifacts show how far I have come in the biology program here at Longwood. It shows I have made many improvements to my writing. It shows that I pay attention to what professors want for their papers because no one has the exact same criteria. It also shows growth in my education from the beginning of sophomore year to senior year. It also shows how in-depth biology can get. You have the ability to stem from one basic topic like cell biology down to genome sequences for example.