Viborg Week 5 Alanna

I can't believe we have been here for a month already. It seems like the more work you have the faster the time flies. After a long week of analyzing and preparing data for our project I can finally sit down and look at it all. In all honesty, this week has been one of the most stressful weeks here. I had to pick up lab skills quickly and prepare myself for sorting out all the data I gathered.

One of the things that is very frustrating about this research is the program SAS. SAS is a statistical program that allows you to enter in data and create graphs and sets using a series of commands. This program uses similar programing styles to that of DOS. I wish I had learned this program before coming here because I realized it's an essential program in our project. When I told Jens I had never used SAS before he looked shocked. Gladly I knew what the program was and its purpose from working with graduate students at school. It takes years to master this program so you must realize how I felt just learning the basics. We have 14 different parameters that we tested on 72 different dairy cows. That amounts to alot of data and alot of time spent graphing results.

Jens and I recently attended a meeting with one of the statisticians here at Foulum to see if we could improve our data and back up our research. I must say, that was one of the hardest meetings to sit through. Although I understood the basics such as normal curves, t-testing, variables, and standard deviations, I could not grasp the concepts of more complex topics. I think this is normal seeing as that I haven't had too much statistics, but it is a bit discouraging. Although all these things have been tough to over come, everyone here has been really great at teaching me the basics.

The one thing that stands out this week for me is realizing science is never as straight forward as one might think. You have to consider all the variables before starting and ending your experiment. When we first started analyzing blood samples I thought it was pretty straight forward. Pipette the plasma, put it in ADVIA (the analyzer), graph it, and there you go...results. Oh no, that's not how it works. There is the "plasma matrix" (all the stuff in the plasma that can effect the sample), the different feeds, time, date, temperature and all sorts of other variables that make it difficult to just read a graph and analyze it. Standard curves have to be placed on all samples in order to ensure its accuracy. I am learning so much about biological statistics and it seems to be making sense. Let's hope I can keep up with the world of biochemistry and statistics as the weeks comes to an end.