Today we had Craft of Research, and we learned about plagiarism and how to avoid it. I had always wondered about how to cite a citation that another paper had used, so it was nice to learn how to do that properly.

We had our lunch and learn with a previous REU student. She walked us through the presentation she gave when she was in the program, explained her journey of how she got to the career she is in today, and gave us some insight on what to expect and how to deal with failure in these next few weeks. It was nice to hear from someone who has experienced essentially the exact same things we have and to see how this program changed her life. I think she was the first one of the presenters who we’ve had that actually went into a field that directly related to her major, so it was nice to see that it’s possible to directly follow a track through graduate school as well as branch out.

I’m excited about this afternoon because the STEM XR group is going to Storm Lake to spend time with the students and get some of their insight on STEM and how they like to learn. We’re going to finally see Storm Lake after talking so much about it. I’m a little bit nervous about interacting with the students, but Meskwaki went really well so I’m hoping that this will too. Also, since we’re going to be working together with the students as a group as opposed to individually working with separate groups of students, I think the conversations are going to be a bit easier.

Until next time 🙂