Hi all,

I hope everyone had a nice weekend last weekend! In the blog today I will be addressing how my mentor meetings have been going, talk about my challenges & failures,  provide an updated loose timeline, and other fun stuff!

Mentor Meetings: 

So far my project partner and I have not met our faculty mentor Patrick yet, because he is away traveling! I hope that we are able to meet him soon so that we can show him our progress. Maybe, if he doesn’t come back for the summer we can begin a game like where’s Waldo, but instead call it where’s Patrick, haha don’t worry I am just kidding he should be back soon!

Our main collaboration thus far has been with our other mentor and current PhD student Fernando, every time we have a meeting with Fernando we tend to get a lot of work done and have some good discussions on where the project is heading. Other than that our main form of communication with him is through Slack. I do wish at times he was a little more readily available in our building for quick questions, because he is often not within the informatics building but overall it is all going well.

Challenges and Failures: 

Many of our challenges and failures came from coming up with our Facebook activities, such as they may not be covered by our IRB and also certain activities are not applicable for a stigmatized group of people. We addressed these with multiple brainstorming sessions and meetings with Fernando, some great white board time, and a lot thinking and revising our ideas. Another obstacle we rain into was a possible issue with our IRB and us being new to this whole IRB thing so what we did was reach out to a few different mentors as well as emailing the IRB expert who’s information we were given at the beginning of the REU. Lastly, we are still up in the air about how some things will be addressed when presented in the Facebook group and are waiting for feedback with people from Positivelink and Drexel.

Updated Timeline: 

Key: Things that were slightly changed in the timeline are in italics.

Week 1: Get to know the basics of the ProHealth REU and meet other REU students and mentors!

Week 2: Have related work and methods outline done. Read and explore more about our specific project including transcribing, summaries, and starting to look at the data. Getting IRB confirmation and other accounts sorted.

Week 3: Draft for related work and methods and an outline for the introduction are due. Delve more into data analysis and finding major themes, along with looking into possible algorithms. Review Facebook activities and solidify what we will do in these activities. Start designing how we will present TreatYoSelf Drexel App (video and guidelines booklet). Will find out how recruitment from Positivelink is going on 6/8/27. More reading.

Week 4: Outline for abstract, draft for introduction, and peer reviews for both related work & methods are due. Start designing an algorithm for our forum data. Meeting with Positive Link to discuss Facebook activities and if changes need to be made to them. Have almost finalized video and guidelines for TreatYoSelf app to be discussed and reviewed with other before meeting on Friday. Meeting with TreatYoSelf group on Friday 6/16/17 to discuss how we will be addressing their app to the Facebook group.  Possibly launch the Facebook group and distribute questionnaire and ice breakers.

Week 5: Draft for abstract & related work, peer review for introduction, methods finalized, and an outline for findings and discussion. If did not already launch Facebook group we will at the beginning of this group, with the questionnaire and ice breakers. Use TreatYoSelf’s groups critics to improve our video and guidelines. Solidify our algorithm for the forum data and start distributing it.  More…

Week 6: Peer review for abstract, drafts for introduction, findings, & discussion, and a finalized related work. More…

Week 7: Draft for abstract, finalized introduction, and peer review for findings & discussion. More…

Week 8: Peer review for abstract and drafts for findings & discussion. More…

Week 9: Finalized for abstract, findings, and discussion. More…

Week 10: Everything is camera ready!!!!

*Also quick note I am trying to keep up on my GRE studies with hope of getting a solid score and will be delving in to where I possibly want to go for grad school* –> This is both exciting and nerve wracking!

Other: 

This week I had the chance to checkout the observatory at IU and it is pretty cool, if you have the chance please check it out! Here is a link where you can check out the schedule and more!

Until next time…

Julia 🙂