I’ve officially finished our REU summer experience! I apologize for the tardiness of this blog post, but the end of week ten was very crazy. We quickly finished our application, packed our bags, and had our final reception and poster session. Despite the final craziness, the last week was exciting nonetheless.

Monday
Monday I wrote a list of small things that needed to be changed in the code. This mostly consisted of adjustments to make the application more user friendly. For example, the user would now enter their settings preferences when downloading the application. This would help guarantee the application would have the necessary information of the the heart rate algorithm. These small adjustments did not take very long, but were very important to the application.

Tuesday
Tuesday I continued to work on these small adjustments. I made sure the other page was working properly. This page was used when the user choose other in any question of the survey. We wanted this page to restate the question and then have a space for the user to elaborate on why they choose other. After this was completed, I began working on the Microsoft Band tile. While working on this, I stumbled across a few problems. The majority being issues with the layout. I needed to find a way to work around this limitations while giving the researchers what they wanted.  Although this was difficult, I know this process of being creative and working around limitations is one that I will often face as a developer.  I worked late this night, but by the end of the night I had something that worked.

Wednesday
Wednesday was the day that we were presenting our application to Dr. Katie Siek. We had everything working well. Now we needed to somehow demo our application. We did this by creating a “demo mode”. This demo mode would allow someone to see both the survey on the band and the survey on the phone. I created a button on the MainActivity. When this button was pressed a notification to take the survey on the band would appear. Additionally, I populated the PendingSurveysActivity with three pending surveys. Altogether, this would give users who are accessing the application in demo mode a general idea of the functionality of the application. After completing this, we showed Dr. Siek our application. The demo mode went well, but we found some issues with connectivity. This was something we would need to work on before the poster session.

Thursday
Thursday was a very crazy day! We needed to get everything ready for the poster session and to go home. In the morning we met with Dr. Connelly and our mentor Majdah. We demoed our final application and discussed our how the program went. After, we took our final assessment. Once all of this was completed, we laser cut our name tags and printed our poster. Printing our poster took Aislinn and I three hours. We were having difficulties getting the correct colors. Although this was frustrating, this gave us some time to work on our poster pitch as well. By 7 o’clock Aislinn and I had completed everything. We then ran home and began to pack everything.

Friday
Friday was our last day. The morning was very crazy. I woke up around 6 am. I began by downloading the application onto phones while attempting to do my make up. I was all readty by 8:30 am, but as I was leaving I noticed many of the other students weren’t. Everyone was attempting to clear out their apartments, while getting ready. So I went downstairs and helped some other students throw out garbage and get their luggage to Willkie North. I then arrived at the IMU for our poster session. The poster session went well. Aislinn and I ended up receiving third place! After, was the reception. The reception was very nice and I enjoyed the keynote speaker. After, we said our goodbyes and I began my 6 hour drive.

Week ten was a long week. Aislinn and I worked late most nights and reach hangry more times than we liked to admit. However, all of extra time we put into this summer was well worth it. I learned more than I thought possible this summer. I developed technical skills, improved my writing and speaking, and learned about research. I am already putting these skills to the test in a week. I have been accepted to give a lightning talk at the STARS Computing Corps Celebration. In the future, I plan to encourage other students at my home university to apply for REUs. I also plan to explore the idea of graduate school more within the next year. This was amazing summer and thank you to everyone to helped make it happen.

Currently on vacation with my sister who I haven’t seen in a year!