It is our last day

It feels very bittersweet

SPIRE-EIT

I ate about 1/2 of a 1/2 of a 1/2 of the World’s Hottest Chocolate Bar during the ice cream social today. Also, the ice cream social was a really good idea. I might have to run one of these at the SDSU VR Club! Anyway, that chocolate warmed the back of my throat. It felt pleasant. Nina and Syema looked like they were dying (don’t worry, we’re all okay!). Birdie enjoyed the chocolate haha.

We’re almost done with our paper!

Can’t wait for the symposium tomorrow.

I learned a new word from Vrinda today hehe.

Also, shout out to Jack for looking over my resume! I gotta fine tune the content and fix the formatting.

Let’s see… I spent some time going through our “References” section of the paper. At the moment, I think one thing I could be doing is working on the conclusion section of our paper.

I will say though, the VR Stress team has been pretty good at splitting up the work evenly amongst ourselves. As a result, it was hard deciding the authorship order. Lucas and I were considering on flipping a coin haha. In the end, we decided it would go: Roselynn Conrady, Lucas Wright, Bradon Thymes, Ala Sobi, Neil Barnett, Lotte Van Dammen, and Elizabeth Shirtcliff.

Yesterday’s Luncheon Lecture featured Alex Braidwood. Super chill dude. I was amazed by how well-rounded he is. Not only is he a designer… he’s an artist, programmer, and engineer. His most interesting work is how he “visualizes” data via sound. Soundification, I think is how he described it.

I think my favorite takeaway was when he told us how he came to Iowa.

I came on accident but stayed on purpose

– Alex Braidwood

There’s a lot that we can’t control in life. But it’s up to us to determine if we can take advantage of these opportunities to do something greater.

For about the past 3 weeks (including weekends), the VR Stress team has been staying until 7:30-8:30pm at VRAC to run experiments.

So far, we are halfway done. We have run 10 participants, and we need about 10 more (ideally) to get a total of 20 participants. Supposedly, we could get away with 18 participants too but… ideally we want 20 for a large sample size.

At the moment, we’ve been chipping away at the poster, research paper, and presentation for Minnesota. We’re at a point where we’re just waiting for the experiments to be done so we can finally have some results.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have any work to do. Neil assigned us a book and journal articles to read from. Further, we have to finish up the last chapter of Behave for our SPIT lab meeting.

The end is in sight.

I felt a nostalgia rush upon entering VRAC this morning. The warmth and mugginess felt like a heavy blanket. It felt like home. (I have no A/C in my house haha)

For the Luncheon Lecture, I enjoyed talking to Dr. Danielson today. His approach to improving education systems is quite interesting. The biggest takeaway, for me, was that lecture capture isn’t always helpful because it depends on the course subject. For example, lecture capture is a fantastic supplemental tool for courses that require more memorization (like anatomy) but not so much for courses that involve more problem-solving (like chemistry).

In the course of our conversation, I asked him about his academic history (what was his major). He said something along the lines of:

“For my undergrad, I majored in English and I minored in Film Studies. I wanted to screenwrite. But the lifestyle I wanted versus my goals… They were different and I had to change paths.”

I appreciated that. I’m still in the process of figuring out a lot of things in my professional life. Originally, I wanted to pursue the more traditional mechanical engineering route of graduating and going straight to industry (most likely working on CAD or HVAC/R systems).

But upon coming here, I realize that I want to chase after innovative research (especially in regards to virtual reality). Also, I realize that I strongly dislike the Midwestern weather (no offense y’all). But… the stuff I want to work on is here… so I’m definitely going to have to compromise between geography and work goals.

VR Stress team still doesn’t have their results yet. We’re still in the process of collecting data, which takes a lot of time.

Talked about this with Neil and he said that we’ll show proto data. In other words, our preliminary results and conclusion. But! We’ll mention that we’ll continue to revise our stuff once we collect more data.

I’m feeling optimistic though.

Thus far, I’ve been using a spreadsheet to keep track of all my papers/references… then I dipped my toes into the Mendeley pool.

… It’s been great. I’ll still double check my citations just in case, but boy oh boy, Mendeley makes it so much easier.

Anyway, the VR Stress team paper has been coming along. The introduction is almost done. We’re going to have to work on the abstract so we can apply for the REU Symposium.

*Mendeley did not sponsor me in any way

Last night, Emmanuelle, Lara, Jennifer, Nina, Kelsey, and I went to the laundromat with Abby. I brought my books and stuff just in case so I would have something to do while waiting… but time flew! I learned a lot about grad school through our conversations.

Makes me realize that I really need to start narrowing down what I want to do after undergrad. It’s so hard to choose! O_O

Last night, I found out that my keycard to get into the apartment doesn’t work. Fortunately, I was going home with Nina so she was able to let me in 🙂

This morning before coming to VRAC, I stopped by the community office to resolve the issue. So at the moment, I have a temporary keycard (that works!). But the office lady said since I’m with a group, my keycard (the one that I got the first time upon coming to Iowa) is different… something along those lines. She says she’ll email once the other keycard gets fixed.

You’re all nice and beautiful people! I just realized that we never exchanged our names or anything… but it was fun talking to all 3 of you!

So sorry that we had to end our conversation on the bus so abruptly ): Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that any of you can see this:

I wish you all the best of luck with your studies and I’m sure that you will make for amazing English teachers. I’d love to meet you all again some day. I feel compelled to visit Brazil! Obrigado 😀

I’m still a little lost on how GenderMag works. Can’t wait to discuss this more in depth tomorrow.

As for discussion… When Dr. Burnett was on the part of, “talking about gender without talking about gender,” I thought that was kind of interesting. From my understanding, she takes these more “feminine” traits and makes them more… gender-neutral. Some examples she used was “risk-aversion” and “tech learning style.”

I wonder if there are other ways to take away the gender from traits, and just make them human traits… I think that’s what I’m trying to get at.

VR Stress team will start running their pilot participants this week (hopefully). Lucas will refine the Unity project by fixing the text (both text 1 and text 2). Another thing we need to do with the project is to have only 1 teacher.

Bradon and I spent some time with Neil to work on the research paper in the afternoon. We learned a lot about how to write our introduction. Also, we’re going to collaborate with an LSAMP student, Ala Sobi, on the methods portion of the research paper.

Changing topics to the Deeper Dive, my high heel is ready to print. I uploaded my STL and SolidWorks parts to our Google Drive. Alex is going to get me some hardware (just hex bolts and nuts). Looking forward to it!

On another note, can’t believe there’s about a month left. I’ve grown and learned so much these past weeks… It’s been bumpy, but in a good way! I like the variety, and I’m thankful to have these opportunities with everyone here.