Week 9

Starting off week nine, I began to edit the formatting layout for the Bayesian network that is displayed in our paper.  Then, I continued to work on our video presentation.  Which I pretty much proceeded to edit for the remainder of this week.  To do this I used Zoom, and shared the screen with my PowerPoint while I narrating in the background.  On Monday, It took me around twenty tries to get a clear and concise video that I could edit.  Then, I uploaded the video to iMovie.  In iMovie, I refined our video, cutting out unnecessary pauses, mistakes, and added background music.   This pretty much took up all of my time on Monday.  On Tuesday, I worked on our reviewer’s response table and made some edits on our paper.  Then, Kate and I looked at the video again and decided to make some more changes to it.  I deleted the first three slides from our video and replaced them with a video which made it more interesting to watch and listen to.  Then, restarted the recording and editing process for our video which took me the remainder of the day.  Wednesday began with me restarting the whole video recording and editing process again because we made more changes to our video.  One big change we made was completely eliminating our last slide and incorporating the information from that slide into the slide that came before it.  This made our video sound smoother than before and got rid of the dull “Findings” slide that we had prior to the changes.  Once again I restarted the recording and editing process, but I took a quick hour and a half break from it and went to our Wednesday workshop held by the amazing Dr. Katie Siek.  At the workshop, we discussed how to continue our research remotely while we are at our home universities.  Dr. Siek also informed us on how much extra time doing research during the school year will take and some possible funding and research opportunities that are available for us to take advantage of.  After the meeting, I continued working on the newest edition of our video for the remainder of the afternoon.  On Thursday, I worked on my peer review assignment for the week and finished up some final edits to our paper.  After, I got the amazing opportunity to go out to lunch with Ben and Anna to talk about graduate school.  I can not stress enough how helpful both Anna and Ben were, they literally took so much stress out of the decision-making process for graduate school.  In fact, Anna and I found out that we share very similar interests in what we like to research/what interests us, so we continued our graduate school conversation over some Soma coffee.  Then,  Kate and I looked at the new video edit and made a few last changes.  We decided to add a CARDIA slide, Bnlearn slide, and a acknowledgments slide.  I’m sure you can already guess what I did next.  I then restarted the recording process and after many hours of refining I finished up our final video.  To be completely honest, it took me copious tries to record a video where I spoke without stuttering, stopping, spoke clearly, and properly transitioned from slide to slide or action to action in our presentation.  Although, one of the hardest parts was finding background music that appropriately suited our video and my voice.  I tried at least 15 different songs before deciding on which one to use.  On Friday, I sent our video to Dr. Natarajan so that he can view it and communicate to us any last minute changes that need to be made before our time in Bloomington comes to a close.  Then, I went to our last weekly team meeting where we present everything we had worked on during the week and everything we plan on working on for next week.  At the end of the meeting, we got the opportunity to hear Ben and Fernando give brief presentations of the projects that they are working on which they will be submitting for publication.  Then, I briefly reviewed our video again just to make sure I did not miss any mistakes or editing opportunities.   Last, I attended our weekly Friday afternoon tea workshop and mingled with everyone.  Overall, week nine was definitely not as stressful as previous weeks.  This usually isn’t the case, but Kate and I got very far ahead on our project early in the summer and both of our mentors moved to Texas last week so we really didn’t have a whole lot left to complete.

After the poster workshop, last Wednesday Kate and I decided to redo the format for our Poster.  We created a new poster using PowerPoint.  A few of the main things that we did differently in our new poster was that we used fewer words and implemented more images and models.  The new poster is a lot more clear and easy to understand from a outsiders perspective.

 

Five things I wish I knew before going into the ProHealth REU experience

  • I would have liked to have a more in depth background of Artificial intelligence.
  • I wish I had a more diverse background in coding languages
  • It would have been nice to understand what Bayesian Networks were and how they work.
  • I would have liked to be more familiar with prior research projects that the faculty and students here have complete.
  • Last, I wish would have known the faculty as a whole a little bit better so that I could be more familiar with how each faculty member goes about conducting research.

Five things future ProHealth students should consider doing

  • Manage your sleep schedule to properly fit your likings. ( either stay up late doing work and sleep a little bit later or wake up early and go to bed early)
  • Definitely, read up on the work of prospective mentors so that you have an idea of what is expected of you while doing research for that person.
  • Do not put things off, if you have a task complete it ASAP because putting it off will only hurt you in the long run
  • Be aware that not everyone in the program is as smart as you and or you may not be as smart as everyone else.  Take this and use it by assessing what your strengths and weaknesses are and use them to your advantage.
  • Try and get an overview of possible coding languages or platforms that you may potentially use during your research experience.  This will save you a lot of time!

link to our poster

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6q2tojv5ljooifa/poster2.jpg?dl=0

Link to video

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/frukmk0jhz1rnwy/AABU2SdwB_SkGhjpOj7KQDzJa?dl=0

Link to reviewers response table

https://docs.google.com/a/depauw.edu/spreadsheets/d/15yuw3gk3pNCpUUrt6lGtn97gXWkWQGCGPTSifyXBTSQ/edit?usp=drive_web