Wow, time has been absolutely flying by as week 8 comes to a close.  After last weeks lightening talk workshop, I learned some new things about myself as a presenter.  I never realized how much you can hear the nervousness in my voice while presenting.  I always get nervous before presentations, I feel like thats pretty normal, but being able to hear what I sound like for myself really gave me new insights on how I can improve my skills and hopefully not sound as nervous in the future.  I started Monday off by doing some volunteer work for a Girl Scout workshop that was held here at the school of informatics.  My fellow researchers and I showed the Girl Scouts how to make paper circuits using copper tape, flux, solder, a solder iron, and LEDs.  As expected, some of the girls were a little intimidated by the soldering iron, but after a little guidance and practice the girls seemed to love it. This workshop took up a good portion of our morning. In the afternoon, Kate and I met with Dr. Natarajan for the last time before he left for Texas.  He has been such a huge influence on my academic career and I’m very thankful for everything he has done for me.  For the remainder of the day, I worked on completing the reviewers response table and making changes to our paper so we could submit it to be peer reviewed by 5pm that evening. On Tuesday, I spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to properly format the Reference section our paper.  This doesn’t sound like a challenging task, but we recently had to change the template for our paper and the bibliography style for our new layout is unique and different.  Then, Kate and I started to further implement and discuss ideas for our poster design.  I then explored multiple poster making applications such as, postermywall, PowerPoint, and Adobe illustrator.  After constructing four different poster designs Kate and I decided on one to use for the poster workshop on Wednesday.  The following morning I continued to make changes to our poster design(which can be found on the google drive).  Kate and I then met with Nandini and we discussed the remaining tweaks that had to be made for our paper.  Since there wasn’t enough time for Nandini to thoroughly go over our entire paper at that given moment, we shared our paper with her and she reviewed/made changed to it that evening.  Then we attended the poster workshop lead by Anna and Fernando and received some very good instructive criticism on how to go about making our poster better.  Once the workshop ended I began the preliminary stages of recording our video.  Using zoom I began the repetitive process of narrating the video, making appropriate script adjustments in regards to length and clarity.  On Thursday, I continued to work on our video for the entire morning.   I honestly do not think I could tell you how many separate recordings it took me to get a someone rough draft of our video.  Even though I had my notes in front of me to read off of, I still managed to stutter or mispronounce a word, but I feel as if that is part of the narrating process.   Although, our video isn’t complete quite yet, I feel as if I am getting close to the final editing process(the video storyboard can be viewed on the google drive).  In the afternoon, Kate and I met with Nandini for the last time before she left for Texas.  Nandini showed us the remaining changes that needed to be made to our paper, and exchanged skype information so she can continue to help us out.  I am very grateful to of had the opportunity to work this Nandini and can not thank her enough for all her help this summer.  Friday started off with our normal group meeting where we discussed the work we completed that week and what work we still have left to complete.  Then, I re-designed our year 20 intersection model for AIC, BIC, and BDe scoring metrics(this can be viewed on the google drive).  The reason we wanted to redo our design is because the previous software we used to create our model wouldn’t allow us to save.  Not being able to save our model made editing take way too much time and thus, I used postermywall instead of Netica to create our new model. Overall, a great week in regards to work, but it was sad having to say goodbye to Dr. Natarajan and Nandini.

As I said earlier, Dr. Natarajan met with us for the last time on Monday before he left for Texas.  Nandini made sure to come and meet with us everyday (except Friday because she left for Texas) and helped us make some of the finishing touches to our project.  With our current situation, I really can not complain about our meeting schedule this week.  Even though Nandini and Dr. Natarajan are in Texas, we are in the process of scheduling daily, hour long, skype meeting with Nandini for the remainder of this project (we will be extending our research beyond the given ten week period).

Since I did not get the chance to talk to Dr. Natarajan in great detail about graduate school before he left, I am going to contact him via email this coming week to see if he has any free time to aid me in the process.  I am not 100% sure what specific field I want to pursue a graduates degree in just yet but I am thinking along the lines of either health informatics or Human Computer Interation. Hopefully Dr. Natarajan can help to steer me in the right direction, I’m excited to hear what he has to say.