Were at the half way mark right now, it’s pretty exciting but stressful at the same time. Monday we started our morning by creating paper circuits with two groups of campers. The first group of campers we had was a lot larger than the second. With that being said, it was a little bit harder to get everyone in the first group involved. Although, I do believe that they genuinely had a good time. One challenge I encountered while dealing with my first group was that I had a trouble maker who kept blurting out random unnecessary comments. It was rather annoiying but after a while he started to listen and the situation was under control. My second group of campers was super small I believe I only had three guys. They were super easy to get excited about paper circuits, which made my job a lot easier. One of the campers made a demon face with two red LED”s as the eyes and a paper tongue sticking out. His buddy sitting next to him made a smiley face with the eyes as green LED’s. After this workshop, I took my lunch break and then Kate and I met with Nandini for about an hour. Nandini gave us the data set that we will be working with, and we started to clean the data. On Tuesday we began playing around with different Bayes net packages that would help us to implement different algorithms on it. I’m going to be honest and say that I am having a really hard time with this. Kate is a very strong coder where I am not and I failed time after time again trying to do this. Wednesday rolled around and we worked on the same task and once again after hours upon hour of trying I failed. Although, Kate succeeded in completing the task. After Wednesday, I became very overwhelmed and stressed out with my work. I am honestly trying my best but can not seem to even come close to completing my coding tasks. With that being said, we got assigned another coding assignment due Monday. I am really hoping I can figure this one out but once again I am so lost and I feel like we keep moving on and I really just do not understand much of anything that is going on. This is making my coding tasks harder and harder to do, and I couldn’t even complete the previous ones assigned to me. Friday, came along and we had a day filled with meeting and a a networking session to help us build upon our skills. All in all, this has been one of the most stressful and frustrating weeks I have had in my four years as being a college student. I am still trying really hard to work on my assignments but just have no idea how to do them. I need help really badly but its hard to get someone to have the time to break things down for me. I am going to keep working hard I’ve never been one to give up so why start now? In retrospect, I will try my best to convert my stress into motivation to learn more and get better!
We have been making some big changes to our paper this week because our goals for the project have recently changed. Since this is the case we had to make pretty much a whole new paper, but are still working on things such as the related work section and Findings. The change in our goals for our project wasn’t a huge obstacle that we faced, it just placed out focus on a different way of going about our research.
Meeting with Dr. Natarajan and Nandini have been alright, as I said before I am just overwhelmed and lost with what we are doing right now. I need help badly! It is just hard to get the time I need with my mentor or just anyone that could possible assist me. It’s extremely stressful and discouraging to not be able to understand what is going on, I am trying. I hope to meet personally with Dr. Natarajan this upcoming week to let him know in more depth what is going on.
Our timeline seems to change from day to day but thus far have completed all the tasks that we have been assigned. As I said Kate and I both have separate assignments due Monday but I am extremely lost with mine. I am going to work all weekend on it but I just feel like I’m in over my head. I’m hoping I can get the help I need to complete this task. In fact, I just emailed my mentor asking for help. Other than that, Dr. Natarajan just informed us that we will be entering our paper with Kate and I as co-authors, but this will not be until after our REU is over because we will have to continue working on our project longer than the ten week period we are given.
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