Week 4 - Leigh Slyker

Although I have already addressed the topic in prior blog posts, I feel obligated to again remark on the differences between engineers and medical students. Some of the medical students in our lab were tasked with plotting cell positions as a violin plot. With no experience in R, and far too many data points to use their usual software, they were seemingly at a loss. Of course, some of their collaborators know how to use R, and would be able to help them. Still, that would require a week's wait, and their continued assistance.

I think many engineering students in this position would see the natural next step as: go learn R, figure out how to do it yourself. While I may just be speaking for myself with that sentiment, I can at least say that it is definitely not shared by the average medical student. With so much information to learn and retain, medical students time has to be devoted to so called "high yield" pursuits. Engineers too have to try for high yields in our pursuits, but there are necessarily more exploratory endeavors in engineering, which is as it should be.

Still, a quote from my freshman year introduction to engineering course always comes back to me: "Engineering requires creativity, but you don't want your doctor to be creative".

I've included the violin plots in question below, each of which is an aggregate of over 20,000 data points. The MATLAB script for analyzing and plotting the data took no more than 20 seconds to run, and it took me less than 5 minutes to find a function that makes violins plots with custom colors and the like.