Dear Diary,

I feel: 😊(happy), 🌧(drenched)

I had a great day (besides being cold from the rain).

We began the morning with our first deeper dive meeting. It was more of a history lecture, which was okay, but it was a little hard to stay engaged at 9:00am.

At 11:30am, the 3D scanning team went to lunch with Professor Beiwen Li and graduate mentors Yi Zheng and Vignesh Suresh. It was great to sit down and get to know Professor Li (especially since he was in China (getting married! 🎉(celebration)) during the first week of this program).

This afternoon I got to walk and talk with Holly Baiotto. She’s a current graduate student at Iowa State University, and she was also an REU intern in 2014! It was really nice to talk with her about her experiences with the program and see the similarities and differences with my experiences so far. I’m working on communicating with others, and she gave good advice of making smaller goals to accomplish speaking up.

We had our second deeper dive meeting, and this one was more hands on. We took the work we had made in our Maya and Unity classes, and guess what?! We turned it into a VR experience! 👌(so cool) 😍(love) I said Maya is only hindered by your own imagination, but my imagination is running wild with all the ideas of what I could make in VR. It’s really cool to see your work in a game, but being able to be immersed in your work is a whole new level of excitement.

After the deeper dive meeting, the 3D scanning team had a group meeting. Jennifer gave her presentation today! Thank you for stepping up and going first, Jennifer. Professor Qin is also planning lunch with the Department Chair of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering.

At 5:00pm, I figured it was time to leave. We were done for the day. Kelsey asked when I wanted to work on some code for our research team. When I realized she meant either now or later (meaning we’d go to the apartments and then come back to VRAC), I committed to staying longer. It’s too much travel time to go back to the apartments and then to Howe Hall and then back. So … we went to work.
There’s a whiteboard in our lab area, and dang if our team didn’t need it. I don’t think we would’ve completed our code without drawing every idea out. I forgot how much I enjoyed working on challenging problems with others. Kelsey, Jennifer, and I argued back and forth, and I find it exhilarating to compare ideas and try to find the best solution.
The most satisfying moment though is when the code runs perfectly. Sure, there are multiple errors when you first compile, and weeding out each one can be tiring, but the end result is so worth the hard work. I’m so happy with the work we did this evening, but I’m also ready for some well earned rest.

Tidbit(s) of information:

• This morning it was really rainy. Thank you, Karina, for sharing your umbrella. 😊(happy) My shoes got really wet though, so my feet were pretty cold throughout the day (reasoning behind the title of today’s post).
• During the walk with Holly, we saw two chipmunks out and about! Chipmunks are so small and cute.

Sincerely,
Lara