Today we met with our mentors, had our first weekly REU meeting, made elevator pitches, and got to eat cake at the tea. Fernando told me more about our project, and I’m even more excited because it seems perfect for me to take a data oriented approach to the problem. Nandini talked to me about stopping in to Professor Natarajan’s lab throughout the REU, which makes the hard choice between projects that interest me a little easier. Since I have some experience, I’m toying with the idea of using a machine learning approach to Fernando and Shih’s data analysis questions since I’ll be spending time with experts in the field anyway. I have a lot of papers to read by Tuesday, and need to make sure I fully understand what’s in the IRB before then as well, so I’m going to be spending a lot of this weekend working and figuring out possibilities for how I approach this project.

I won third place in the elevator pitch contest. I stuttered some, and our impartial judge told me that I needed to make more eye contact. Honestly I had a hard time keeping myself calm, to which the solution is probably just to practice more.