Final Thoughts

20.020 is over! I am happy and sad, and proud of what my group accomplished. It is so strange to look back at past blogs, getting a peek into my brain at that point in time. I almost don’t even recognize my own thoughts. Looking over the old blogs, I decided that 20.020 was one of the most worthwhile classes I’ve ever taken. It reminds me a lot of Terrascope, but taught in a smaller and more focused setting, which I preferred. Both projects I undertook this year were incredibly complex, much more so than I realized at first. In both cases, there was no way to account for all the possible variables; we just had to pick solutions that seemed like they might work and improve on them as we went. Improving—that was an enormous part of design. More so than for the other group, our project went through a number of iterations as we went. First it was some sort of plastic decomposer that we might use in the landfill or oceans or who knows where… It later morphed into an E. coli with a salt balance kill switch, then a cyanobacteria equipped with plastic degradation enzymes, and finally a vibrio bacteria that we used to decompose additives instead of plastics themselves. I could never have predicted our final product at the very beginning of the process, and from the end looking back at the beginning, our idea seems so simplistic and doomed for failure. I could probably come back next year and improve on our idea even further—I wonder how long it would take to crystallize into a project that a “real engineer” would actually work on. I put “real engineer” in quotes, because I don’t think of myself as an engineer. But really, I just need more practice. I never thought we would be able to come up with the project we did; it makes me wonder what else I can do that I think I can’t.