This week was awesome! As I prepare to present my work at the Rice Poster Symposium, my nerves heighten, but I know that it won’t be as hard as some of the previous feats I have been tested with. Nothing was harder than the Great Plains Honors Council. We finished presentations this Tuesday for the lab, and it went well! We also finished the poster and got accepted to present at the symposium! I really hope to apply to REUs next summer to gain some in-person lab experience. I’m so grateful for my mentor, my faculty instructor, and Dr. Faiza for all their help during the process. I start classes on August 26 and am excited for what’s to come.

This week was very slow as I had finished my manhattan plot with my brother. Avey and I finished the abstract and poster which we submitted to Sunny for revisions. It was a good week although slow and uneventful.

Week #8 of my research internship has been a rollercoaster. Progress has been slow but steady, with the Manhattan plot proving to be a monstrous obstacle. Despite my best efforts, I’ve spent countless hours refining it, only to hit roadblocks repeatedly. Not asking for help has held me back from finishing this project sooner, but now I realize that seeking assistance is sometimes the smartest move. My brother’s expertise in coding is exactly what I need to push forward. This humbling experience has taught me the value of teamwork and knowing my limits. I’m now ready to collaborate with my brother to finally finish!

This week, Hurricane Beryl hit Houston on July 8, leaving me without power and internet up to the day I’m writing this blog (7/13/2024). It was challenging to get any work done without internet, but I found refuge in local coffee shops where I had internet access and the help of my older brother on my coding project. Together, we finished creating a standard deviation bell curve, which shows where most of the probe feature importance values lie. Specifically, 98% of feature importance values are less than 0.285. We then completed coding the process to generate a histogram showing the importance of specific CpG sites across tissues. A fun fact: 8 probes have a feature importance of 0.35 across over 6 tissues! With my brother’s assistance, I was able to produce outstanding data that brings me one step closer to wrapping up this project. It was a strange week, but surprisingly productive in terms of project completion! Week 8 will include creating a probe vs. location Manhattan plot, which will be an awesome visualization tool for our data!

Thanks for reading,

John Paul Marconi

This week, I was working on methods to categorize the data on 26 histograms. While a short process, it took me a long time because of bugs in my code. This allowed me to set a threshold value so I can, next week, use this to finish the rest of the assignment, including making a detailed location vs. probe Manhattan plot and a histogram showing the statistical significance of the probe feature importance.

Thanks for reading!

This week was pretty eventful and I’m making so much progress with Kaggle Python tutorials. Me and my friend Nathaniel are making such great strides in our coding journey. This is the last week designated for Kaggle learning set by my mentor and lab leader so I have to work into the weekend ensuring that I’m competant enough to construct some histograms and the final boss! A manhattan plot, which I believe will be crucial to discovering key elements in the structure aware data set. Here are a few photos of the field trip I took today to the City of Sugarland Surface Water Plant Facility.

This week went by way too quick and it was another busy week of learning code. This Tuesday however, was great because I was given some websites to guide my learning process by both my REU peer Nathaniel and by Dr. Yao, the lab owner. Going into this weekend I will continue to learn the python coding language so that I will be ready for what weeks 5 and 6 have in store. I have to learn the foundations before I can do anything more in depth!

I just wrapped up my second week as a Virtual Research Student and it has been steady and relaxed. As we start the first couple weeks, my student mentor is allowing us the time to get adjusted to the meeting schedule. I accidently missed my meeting on Tuesday but because Sunny is understanding she just told me to make sure to check in next week! However, I did make it to my group meeting with Sunny and Avey where we discussed some project specific questions and it gives me hope to get my questions answered and recieve clarifying project information. Throughout this week I have been doing python tutorials that include the basic elements of Python which includes the pandas library which will allow me to visualize the data provided. This is crucial to analyzing patterns within the data to understand to the scope of the research. Anyways, that’s about it! This week was just warming up to python and thinking about which ways I want to analyze the data to come up with a hypothesis!

Thanks for reading!

This first week of my first REU program at Rice University has been exciting because I have not done anything as academically important as this. Going into this REU experience, I knew it was going to be hard, and I wanted to really produce some good work to impress my student mentor, but more importantly, to show myself what I’m capable of doing. This REU is heavily rigorous in coding, and since I have barely any experience coding, I’m using this project as a time to force myself to LEARN Python once and for all, so I’m prepared to code for my upper-level classes in college.

On Tuesday, May 28th, it was the first day of my REU program, and it started with me parking at Greenbriar lot and walking 1 mile (20 minutes) to Rayzor Hall, in which I didn’t realize there were shuttles to take me over there. At Lone Star College, we don’t have shuttles to give us rides because our campus is so small compared to Rice. I was greeted by the program leaders, Dr. Faizar and Dr. Clay, and I was running late, so I had to eat breakfast while everyone was already heading into the room. I wasn’t stressed because I was sure I wouldn’t miss much, so I quickly and calmly ate and headed in. We started by setting up our Rice Canvas and submitting our pre-assignments. I didn’t have my laptop because I left it at my girlfriend’s house, so I had to use my phone, which wasn’t too much of a problem. Orientation was just like any other orientation: a lot of sitting, listening, and it was like listening to Friday forums or workshops at my home campus at Lone Star College Kingwood. Halfway through orientation, we ate lunch at a big dining hall, and it felt so bougie, as if we had deserved to be there, a full buffet prepared for the students at Rice University. I suddenly realized why the cost of attending the university was so high: they pour the money back into the school. I sat at lunch and was delighted by how interesting the conversations were with my newly befriended REU peers. After orientation ended, I took a shuttle back to Greenbriar, where I waited in traffic for about an hour before I got home.

On Wednesday, May 29th, I got to enjoy lunch with my project mentor, Sunny Kim, and my partner, Avey. We conversed and talked about our educational interests and our current occupations. I told Avey and Sunny some of my life story, like moving from place to place, and about my experience at Lone Star College thus far. I was surprised to hear that my partner Avey was transferring to Stanford University and that she had been accepted to other great schools like Rice prior to the REU starting. I was interested in how she had such a great acceptance rate into these top schools, and it made me inspired that if I could just write some great college essays, I could also get into a top school with my qualifications. I was truly inspired. Afterwards, I got to go to a meeting with my project mentor and partner, where we discussed our project. It’s focusing on epigenetics and DNA methylation, and it sounds like it’s going to be SO interesting to learn about for the next 10 weeks. The computer science building, named Duncan Hall, was SO ODD; it was like a maze, but it was really interesting and colorful. I’ve never seen a building designed like that ever before!

And this wraps up my week. It was exciting, long, and gives me hope for the next 9 weeks.

Thanks for reading,

John Paul Marconi