REU Week 10 | Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab

Wow. The ProHealth REU is over. What a crazy ride it’s been!

So much has changed from writing my last blog. At the end of last week, I was really worried about the backend and how we were going to get that set up on top of all of deliverables. Our team was also worried about how soon our IRB was going to come through so that we could perform our usability study.

As it turns out, neither the backend or the IRB materialized in time for us to go ahead as planned. I expressed some of my concerns about the backend to Dr. Clawson early in the week, and we agreed to drop our focus on it since this was the last week and focus on the rest of deliverables instead. After we hadn’t heard anything more on the IRB by the end of Tuesday, Michael and I talked with Dr. Siek about alternatives to the usability study and settled on a cognitive walkthrough that would help Michael and I evaluate our app.

Thus, most of the week was spent working on deliverables. In the the beginning of the week, Michael continued working on the poster and I rewrote the related works section of our paper. The two of us performed the cognitive walkthrough on Wednesday and found some errors that we should fix before launching. Thursday I wrote the results and discussion section of our paper while Michael did some fine-tuning on our press release and poster, the latter of which we printed that day. We recorded our video together on Thursday, and Michael assembled it that evening.

Finally, Friday was our poster symposium! After getting packed up and moved out of our apartments that morning, we all went over to the IMU to showcase all our work that summer. Each group set up their and then discussed our project with and answered questions of guests. Below is a picture of me presenting our app to Dr. Lamara Warren, credit Tracy Theriault.

After the presentations were finished, we had a delicious luncheon and got to hear from a speaker on his experiences in researcher and journey from undergraduate to professor. Finally, some awards were presented, then goodbyes began and several people headed back to Willkie to board a shuttle or start driving home.

Because I still had some edits to make to our paper, I settled down with Susan in the IMU student lounge to crank out the final stretch. I finally finished at about seven, and my dad arrived at about eight to take me back home.

I have learned so much in these past ten weeks, and I’ve been very grateful for many experiences I’ve had. While I’m still uncertain whether research is something I want to make my future career, I’m proud of the work our team accomplished and excited to see where it goes in the future!

If you’re interested in following what I’m up to in the future, feel free to check out my LinkedIn page or my personal website! Have a great rest of the summer!