Today, we continued to get ourselves oriented with the 3D scanner that is set up inside VRAC and we learned from Eliot about the benefits of grad school on our careers.
This morning, everyone in our group finished running our 3D scanners. Unlike when we needed twenty minutes to explain how to run everything, we were able to run the whole sequence in a few minutes.
We were also able to capture parts of a fingerprint. Yesterday, Micah set the camera and projector so they captured images much faster than before, so our fingers would move less and we can get a more accurate result. It’s a little scary how this might be used to make realistic replicas of our biometrics, but look at the details that we scanned!
Our next steps after this would be to figure out how to stitch several of these scans together and convert this to a 3D model to print. Ultimately, we will also figure out how to automate this process by writing a script.
After scanning our fingers, we continued with a lecture by Eliot Winer, who gave great advice about going to grad school. I feel like I can better verbalize my reasoning to go to grad school, which is so I can learn to tackle more interesting problems, develop myself across different fields, and ultimately work on what I love. Through this understanding, I hope to become a better advocate for the decisions I make in the future.
One last thing that I am becoming more conscious about over the past few months is how I react to mistakes. In high school, I was very risk-averse, but over the past semester, I have been more inclined to take risks. For example, I am trying to apply to different opportunities (like this one!) or take responsibility for larger changes in group projects. Although I might feel devastated after a negative outcome, even if I try to prepare for these outcomes, the good thing is that I remain calm and search for solutions more often than not. I hope to understand the role of my emotional responses as I take more risks and embrace making mistakes. At the same time, I seek to improve how I recover from mistakes and failures so I can move closer to solutions.