Last night was pretty fun. I got my MCA project pretty much nailed down after talking with Alex for an hour or so! At home, I talked with my friends from home for a while and then we watched yet another episode of GoT.

This morning, we had a Craft of Research session about blogging and plagiarism. Yvonne talked about how it is important for us to blog everyday for a number of reasons and gave us tips on blogging. In the afternoon, we had lunch with a former REU intern, Holly, who eventually ended up going to ISU for the HCI masters and is now working in industry. It was really interesting hearing about her experience and how the program has evolved from then to now. Some of the things that stuck with me were when she talked about her expectations for the research and how it felt leaving the program. She told us about how she had expectations for how far the research project would get but then had to adjust as they got closer to the end of the project. We are only in week 5, but I feel like I will have to do the same. The CommHEAT project description talked about developing an app and doing user testing, but so far all we have done is reading (which I know is important) so I don’t know how far into prototyping we will get. She also briefly mentioned the grief that she went through and how weird it felt to go back to undergrad after this experience. I think that I will feel similar to her since we have all been getting along so well. Overall, it was a really cool experience to hear from someone that was once in our shoes.

I’m not sure what we will be doing tonight, but I’m sure we’ll do something.

Here is a picture of the sky from when we were laying out in the sun: