Wrapping Up…Sort Of
It’s the last week of blogs! This week, I’ve mostly been preparing for my presentation and finishing up my paper. For the presentation, I mostly just had to transfer information from my papers to PowerPoint and spoken form. The paper was a bit more complicated.
The first step was to track down all the different parts of my study. I took the introduction and methods sections from my protocol, added on the results section that I’ve been writing in a separate document, and then listed all the citations from the introduction and methods at the end. Then I went through the methods and changed the tense of the verbs for the steps that I already did – there was a lot of “will” that needed to be “was,” but since I’m not done with my study yet, some of it needed to be kept future tense as well. After that, I had to polish up my results section a bit. Because my study is still in progress, there were a few unfinished sentences that needed correcting and a little rearranging to do. Next, I wrote short discussion and conclusion sections to reflect my preliminary results. The last step was to finalize my citations. As I’ve mentioned before, as I write my results, more studies get added in different places, and the order of the references depends on the order the studies are cited in the paper. Because of this, I’ve been just leaving a bookmark in all the places I need to cite each study. Now that I’m turning in the paper, I had to replace all those bookmarkers with the proper citations.
All that’s left is a final proofread, and I’ll be ready to turn in my preliminary results! What those results are? Well, you’ll have to come to my presentation – or even wait for the final paper – to find out. What I can tell you, though, is that even though there are some conflicting results, associations have been found between toxins we are exposed to in our everyday lives, like endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, and air pollutants, and decreased success in the IVF process at every stage I’ve examined so far. In light of this evidence, it could be beneficial for couples undergoing IVF to minimize exposure.
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