Today we started our day with another craft of research session with Yvonne. She walked us through the discussion section and how to present our results. 

Then, Harrison and I worked on getting the trivia question system running on the builder component in Psychopy. A bit ago, Sophie was able to fix some of the issues we were having in the coder component, but Harrision and I wanted to get it running in a layout that was more readable for Aron and others who aren’t as familiar with Python code. Today was a semi-success though because we were finally able to get it running all the way through, but we still have some things to fix. 

At 11, Eliot came in as the guest speaker for the lunch and lecture. Something that I thought was really interesting to hear about was his medical imaging research, because I’m enticed by the medical field. He told us about the app that he helped create called Bodyviz that allows various forms of interaction while looking at scans of parts of the body. He pulled it up on his iPad and then passed it around so we could all play around with it. You can cut into the tissue, set colors by density, move up and down through the slices, etc. He said that he had it pulled up in the C6 at one point, and I can’t even imagine how cool that would be to feel like you were actually in the body looking through the tissue and bones. I also started a bit of medical imaging research back at Gonzaga towards the end of this past semester, so I enjoyed hearing about new things that are being done in that area. 

During the second half of the lecture, we spent some time going around to share where we imagine ourselves down the road. The dreaded question – buttt such an important question to start thinking about now – especially while we’re here this summer because there are so many people who are experts in so many areas. I definitely want to reach out to someone this summer to learn more about how I could apply my math and computer science interests into the medical field, because right now I don’t have much of an idea about what a future in that field would look like.  

Eliot also made a comment about being a swiss army knife. This phrase has stuck with me throughout the day because it’s similar to what Wesley Lefforts touched on during his lecture about how there is no such thing as a wasted experience. The more you learn, and the more time you put into learning how to learn, the better you will become at applying yourself to other things that come up.

Overall I feel like I took a lot from Eliot’s presentation. He made me think more about what I want to end up doing – do I want to be working in industry, where I could be working on the same problem for years? Do I want more flexibility in my schedule and to have more freedom to explore whatever interests me more? So much to consider. 

After lunch, Harrison, Sophie, and I headed over to the EEG lab to meet Aron. I’m definitely starting to see and feel the complications that arise with doing research. We hooked Aron up to the cap today, and were still having some issues with the signals being outputted onto the computer. 

Tonight, we had a zumba-type dance class. Maybe 50% of the time it was me missing the steps, 40% laughing, and then 10% kinda getting the moves. It was fun to get up and moving though.