Things I learned in the first year

What I learned in the first year - wanted to summarise earlier, but just got so busy after the fall semester began. 

General: 

1. Download any papers for free!!! This is a surprising perk of being in a university community. I had to order a physical copy of an article I want to read, waiting for a week for it to arrive. There is no PDF that I can import to a reference manager software or anything. It is a huge advantage. Industry has a handicap for this aspect.

2. Citation manager. There is nothing more convenient than this. Once you learn how to use it, and how to generate databases, you will never want to go back to typing all the references manually. There are some drawbacks in reference managers as they are not perfect, such as poor sync when used in 2 or more computers, limited storage space for all PDF files, and need for manual correction of import of old articles, BUT advantages far outweigh. Besides, if you need more space, you do not import PDF, that's it. Some issues can be solved pretty easily.

Classes
1. SAS!! The statistical analyses I learned from scratch were very very useful. It was lucky to have such a good teacher in my stats class. She was excellent in explaining things in plain words, the concept of statistical tests, and how to plan your experiment. Not everyone can do that. SAS is a very convenient tool, easy to use, results are visually clean, and pretty flexible. I like using R, but after getting used to SAS, I thought I want to stick to SAS as long as I can. R is more crude in a lot of aspects, because of course, it is free. The advantage of being in a university environment is again the ability to access this otherwise super expensive software at a fairly reasonable price. I got to learn how to test the differences between samples, assign letters to them, and what to think when planning an experiment. Super useful. If only I had this high standard training when I was an undergrad...

2. Basic plant breeding Polyploidy
It was challenging as I stated with little knowledge on plant science and breeding. The first class of plant breeding was named as "advanced", but it contained a lot of basic information. It was useful to me, and it was lucky to be able to start with this class. Still a lot to learn, but I have better idea on breeding schemes they use. Then the polypolidy class covered more complicated ploidy and prolifereation mechanism of plants. It was interesting too to see how hard it is to work on crops that are not diploid and homozygous. Wheat is homozygous, but hexaploid, corn is outcrossing, potato is tetraploid and homozygous.. It is surprising that genome duplication and outcrossing have been quite common in plants history while it is not like that in animals. 

3. Sensory in plant science PBGB Symposium
In this seminar, we read 24+ papers on sensory quality of various crops such as strawberries, apples and tomatoes. I learned a lot about the ongoing research on flavour compounds and synthetic pathways in those crops. They are very thoroughly studied, especially tomatoes. It is an irony that domesticated and mass-produced tomatoes have less flavor because of harvesting early. There are many compounds that are synthesised only when the flesh enters mature stage, and so those compounds that make tomatoes tasty are never expressed when harvested so young. It was interesting to see a connection of food science and plant science. Often times, those two majors do not work together. It seemed to be a lot of work to arrange things for this symposium, but it seemed worthwhile, if the theme is right for you. Sometime I want to organise a symposium with a theme "Bridging between plant science and food science - End use quality of plants."

4. TONS of writing.
Faster and more precise. It is a career-long endeavour, but I like that. We cannot communicate without documentation. The best way of learning is to read, so I am happy to produce papers and articles people would read.

Lab
1. Cooking time measurement

2. Resistant starch method - still getting higher errors. Gotta work out how to produce stable results.  

3. What it is to grow beans in the field - Patience needed! It's a lot of work to prepare seeds and take field notes. AND harvesting, needless to say. One thing I can say for sure is that I prefer to work in a lab rather than in a field.

4. Crossing in the greenhouse - I made lots of crossing. The more F2 seeds you got, the more selection to make, and it takes time! The reward for work is more work!! I need to start early to do two cycles..

5. Bean paste work! It was a whole new idea to test bean paste quality on Michigan beans. It was fun. There are some limitations to it because of lack of expertise or equipment, but we were able to do a decent preliminary experiment.

6. Sensory analysis by general public - another interesting experience related food science. This is how it works. And it's surprising you need to compensate people with $5 or $10 (cash!) for tasting your food! In the US, EVERYTHING costs money!!