This week, we started the peer review process. It was interesting to read my colleagues work and see the different approaches that they took in writing their paper in terms of styles and structure of their related works and methods even though we are all following the same template. Before reading their paper, it never noticed that one’s research topic has a significant impact on how their paper is structured an organized. It seems obvious, but it became even more obvious to me this week.

Also this week, we conducted our first outreach activity. We worked with older adults and taught them how to build paper circuits. Working with them was fun and their eagerness to understand what they were doing made teaching them easy. It was very rewarding hearing them say that they enjoyed working with us REU students. It definitely helped to validate the work that we are doing.

This week, I struggled with staying on top of my reading. We finally started our ARC study so we had a lot of data to move, code and analyze. My biggest struggle is adjusting to a non-routine schedule. We are constantly being introduced to something new every day so, it becomes difficult to set aside one set time to do what you have to do and actually get it done in that time alotted. Nonetheless, this week, I learned a lot about Dedoose and Tableau. I also learned about what R-Studio can do; however, I am not confident in my abilities to use Dedoose and R-Studio as yet but, I know that I will get there the more I continue to use the systems to analyze the data that we are collecting. One of my biggest reasons why I struggle with getting tasks done the fact that these research projects have a relatively large team. Therefore, there are a lot of people with different responsibilities that I have to communicate with and that slows down my ability to get started or to complete a task that I am assigned or assign myself.

This week, in our meeting with saId research team members, we discussed authorship. It was communicated that if I want authorship, I do, I can get it as long as I am willing to contribute and put in the work that it requires once the 10 weeks are over in addition to what I’ve been working on. At the end of the 10 weeks, my final deliverable will include a paper, and a video to go along with that paper. Additionally, we would have all of our demographic data graphed, this will be done by the end of next week. We will have different graphs that display the participants’ activity and interactions throughout the study, we have started to do this. We will also have all of the coding done for the data that we collect.

My mentor, research partner, and I met on Friday. It was very productive meeting in terms of what the plan is for the next few days until we met again. It was also a productive meeting because we were able to figure out how we planned on organizing and graphing data that keeps track of the timing at which participants respond to the posts.
I am behind on my timeline in terms of readings. I only was able to read 3 new articles this week. My amendment for that is to generate a list of about 10 readings that I believe will be highly relevant or important to my study and rank them in order of importance. Hopefully, I have them read by the end of next week, but if I don’t get to read them all I would have the “important” readings completed.

Carla Update: I tired Qdoba for the first time! It is better than Chipotle, I must admit. Here is a photo of a Qdoba in Oregon (I did not take a picture of the location I visited).