Week 5 - Huang

This week I began brainstorming project ideas with my mentor. I attended a few meetings during which Urology residents and a few med students presented their side research projects. These meetings allowed me to get a glimpse into how students with a medical education approach research, and I contrasted this with how engineers approach research. Firstly, the data that medical researchers use is mostly statistical data, while the data that engineers use is mostly experimental data. Secondly, due to their previous education, most med students did not have a background in statistics and programming, so sometimes it was hard to understand what information was being communicated in the graphs that they presented. At times, I felt that certain graphs could have been done differently to communicate the data more effectively, and other times, I felt that a lot of data could have been synthesized into one clean graph. I guess I am just not used to working with statistical data, where there may or may not be anything to show at all. In engineering, we are trained to find trends in data that hopefully support our hypothesis, and then we will spend copious amounts of time making the perfect figures that clearly illustrate our findings. Therefore, I came away from these research meetings still a little confused about what was being shown since I felt that the data was not presented effectively. Again, this could be due to the med students' lack of training in data analysis, or it could just be the nature of these medical statistics.