Week 10

Wow. This is the end. My desk is bare and my room is empty. Just writing this is hard because I don’t want it to end. Ten weeks made me want to stay around longer. I am extremely grateful for this program and how it has impacted my life. Thanks, Dr. Natarajan and Nanini for mentoring me; I learned so much from each of you. Dr. Siek, thank you for being such a role model; you really deserve the title of “Wonder Woman”. Of course, thank you to everyone who has supported me in both Arkansas and Indiana; I could not make it through this summer without your support.

If you are reading this blog and thinking about applying: do it. You will come out of it with relationships and experience you can get from few other places.

3-Year Plan

  • Year 1
    • Get a Computer Science club started at Hendrix
    • Continue to research and improve coding skills during the school year
    • Explore my interests
    • Apply to summer REUs, internships, and NIH positions
  • Year 2
    • Continue to grow the CS club’s outreach component
    • Attend Grace Hopper
    • Apply to summer REUs, internships, and NIH positions
    • Study for the GRE
  • Year 3
    • Try something big with the CS club
    • Conduct independent research
    • Take the GRE
    • Apply for graduate school

Goals

  • Finalize the Deliverables
    • The poster is printed. You can see the final version here. I’ve put everything I’ve done this summer on GitHub, with the exception of the paper. The paper is very close to being ready to submit. I just want to wait until it’s refined to document it.
  • Plan a road trip with Gabi
    • We don’t have a strict itinerary yet, but we know where we are going and we know what we want to do.
  • Develop a better professional presence
  • Pack
    • It was a very late Thursday night, but (hopefully) everything is in my van.

 

Weekend

Since it was my last weekend in Bloomington, I just tried to take everything in. On Saturday, I went to the Farmer’s market and listened to live music for a few hours. Afterward, I went to the Pourhouse cafe and worked on my computer a while. It was a very chill day.

That night, Gabi and I made a more solid plan for our road trip. Since Gabi doesn’t have her passport, we are going to Cleveland rather than Canada. I’m a little sad that I won’t be going to Canada, but there are lots of cool things to do in Cleveland.

Disaiah, Thomas,  Meagan, and I decided to end our church hopping experience with something altogether new. We went to the Baha’i Community Center of Bloomington (picture). I had read about Bahai in my World Religions class and this seemed like one of the few opportunities I would have to check it out.

In the evening, Mina, Disaiah, Thomas, and I went to a free outdoor concert in a local park (picture). The same band I listened to at the Farmer’s market was performing, so it was very relaxing.  It was nice to just spend time with friends without any rush or expectations.

Monday

For most of the morning, I worked on creating business cards to hand out on Friday. They took a lot longer than I was expecting, mostly because the printer didn’t like the cardstock I was feeding it. Though I wish the paper was a bit thicker, they turned out quite nicely. You can see the final document here.

Rob and I went out to lunch with Patrick. We ate at Dat’s and talked about life, research, and the intersection of the two. It was nice since I hadn’t really gotten to talk to Patrick before; he is a very interesting guy.

Quite a bit happened in the afternoon. First, I uploaded all of the data I cleaned to Box so that Nandini could play around with it and try new network structures. I also wrote some quick code so that missing values were imputed with the max rather than the mean of the observed features. I also transferred the paper from AAAI format to IEEE format, since we are submitting to BIBM. Everything looks good except the bibliography, which Nandini said that she could help with.

Near the end of the workday, I checked in with Ms. Lassiter-Counts, the Career Services counselor that worked with me as I applied to Reus last fall.  Talking to her made me realize what a profound impact this program has had on me.

Tuesday

Not a lot happened today. I worked on some finishing touches for the poster and continued to work on paper formatting. Also, I realized that I had nearly $300 left on Campus Access, so I went to the bookstore and tried to spend some of it.

In the evening, I got called back to the office by Mina and Anne. I had volunteered to help them with the study they are conducting this week. They have a participant that I need to run the workshop with tomorrow and possibly another person on Thursday. My job would be to lead the participant through the workshop, asking questions and recording comment about the toolkit as I go. So that I could better understand how each aspect of the toolkit worked, I spent a couple of hours reading the workshop directions and fooling around with the different lilypad Arduino toolkits.

Later in the evening, I watched Hunt for the Wilderpeople with Max, Meagan, and Gabi. It was a weird and wonderful film. I liked having one last night to just hang out with some of my ProHealth friends.

Wednesday

The end of the program is starting to feel real today. I had to do my exit interview in the morning. I also spent a while this morning printing off the poster. It seemed so final. You can see the final poster design here. I think that it turned out pretty well.

For the Wednesday Workshop, two speakers came in to discuss Ph.D. careers outside of Academia. It was very interesting to listen to their professional journeys. I liked having the chance to ask questions about their transition from a graduate program to the “real world”.

One of the study participants canceled for today, so I didn’t end up running any workshops. There is still a possibility that I will run one tomorrow, though.

In the evening, I gathered food donations to take to Hoosier Hills tomorrow. There was a lot more frozen food than I had expected.

Thursday

Well, today was a very busy day. In the morning, Max and I drove to Hoosier Hills to drop off a trunk full food donations. It was a bit of an adventure getting there due to the construction, but Max was a pro with directions. We got back pretty much right on time for the group exit interview, which ended up just being an online survey.

When I got to ProHealth, I also learned that I would be leading 2 workshops today with a 2-hour break in between. Sadly, I had to miss the mock poster session to do the first workshop.

The workshops went pretty well. The two people I worked with were able to use all of the bases successfully (picture). I appreciated having the opportunity to do this since my project didn’t have an in-person component to it.

Between workshops, I had barely enough time to run over to the Lilly Library. I passed it every day going to work, but I never went in until today. There were all sorts of neat things on display, including an Oscar and a Gutenberg Bible (picture). I also had to clean out my cubical space (picture), which made me really sad.

It was a very late night. I had put off most of the packing until tonight and I also had to help Gabi move her stuff into her storage unit.

Friday

My last day at the ProHealth REU was extremely busy and I didn’t expect any less. Everyone got up early to get things moved out. Gabi set up a schedule so each dorm had a check-out time, which helped a lot. We all got to the poster presentation room with plenty of time to set up before things started.

The poster presentation session was a lot of fun. Rob and I (picture) got to speak with a lot of curious professors and students about our work and experiences. I’m glad I had the chance to make business cards since I handed several out.

After the poster presentation, there was a wonderful lunch and speaker. The keynote speaker discussed some of her recent research, which focused on the differences between genders in science. It was very insightful.

The luncheon concluded with a brief awards ceremony. Rob and I were very honored to receive the award for Best Project Runner-Up (picture). The ProHealth REU group then met one last time for a brief but tearful goodbye.

Once we saw the ProHealth students off on their shuttle back to the airport, Gabi and I (picture) began our road trip. We have had several adventures so far today (picture picture). I can’t wait to see what the next few days, months, and years will bring!