Hey! I was really good about blogging every day for most of the program, but recently I’ve been slacking off. I’m still trying to accomplish my goal of blogging every weekday, so here I go:

Monday, July 22

Monday was the trip to Minnesota! I’m normally happy with 3 hour car rides; it makes me feel road-trippy but isn’t too extreme. This trip was no exception, which was good. I just wish I hadn’t sat in the middle seat on the entire way there…that was a bit uncomfortable.

The University of Minnesota was gorgeous! I think it also helped that there was perfect weather. I wish we had more time to walk around the really nice campus and explore.

It was great to see the other VR demos and the redirected walking lab. I’d heard of redirected walking before from Dr. Jon Kelly and Stephen. I thought that the museum-scan demo was super cool, and I wonder if there’s any applications in product design that could use that. What if we could explore how a product looks in all these different conditions? What about testing for product displays in windows?

There was some great presentations on what our groups and their groups were doing. I was really proud of our group’s presentation and how we handled the questions. I saw that some of the MN labs used Jon Kelly’s research; we’re so fortunate to have him here at Iowa State.

The Mall of America was really fun. I didn’t get too lost (surprisingly), but I had my roommates there to help me out. I also appreciate them for giving me time to shop for my family and not leave me behind. One of the highlights was a store called Wonders Ice Cream. I got a frozen dessert that looked too good to eat:

I also went to the Nickelodeon store and got Appa, an air bison from the show Avatar the Last Airbender:

Overall, the trip was really fun, and I’m really thankful I had this experience during the REU.

Tuesday, July 23

I came to work not feeling well, so I went to Freddy soon after. Not much happened…

Wednesday, July 24

I came back to work today feeling 100%. I met with Lucia to review that I had missed about the data, that the team had went over the day before. We finally got our results back, and they were not what we expected. There’s more to discuss when we present our poster on Tuesday! I also talked to Lucia at length on how to change my resume. I need to make sure that I’m framing the research I am doing here correctly. I think that’s an important takeaway that I should figure out before I leave.