I’m just gonna separate the past two days from today because I want to do a longer final reflection in a different post.

Wednesday was busy busy. Harrison, Sophie, and I finished our paper. Aron stayed in the lab with us pretty much all day on both Tuesday and Wednesday, and he was a huge help as he wrote our results and discussion sections in particular. It was a lot of work, but I’m content with how it turned out considering this was my first time writing such a technical research paper. After work, Andrea, Alee, Harrison, Sophie, Rodney, and I went to the gym one last time to rock climb. I decided to try a harder run than I had on Monday, and I made it to the top. It was a struggle though. I couldn’t untie my harness once I got down. That night, we all got together to watch a movie called Nope. We wanted to watch a horror move, but Harrison and Rodney were too scared to do a real horror movie (boo) (lame) (bums), so we watched that. It wasn’t bad, but I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi, so my review is probably biased. Also, it wasn’t scary in my opinion…you would think I would be totally chillin during the movie then. Nope. Unfortunately, I was sitting between two jumpers and screamers: Andrea and Harrison. Everytime they jumped or screamed I did too. Lol. It was still fun to watch a move together though. 

Yesterday was a doubly whammy: exit interviews and the symposium. If I could get away with never being interviewed again, I would be content. It’s one thing to talk to someone – my friends or family or whoever – about my experience this summer, but its another to be in a studio, sitting in a chair with 3 cameras on you, and all the other interns watching you in the other room as you’re being interviewed. I got through it, although, I’m nervous to see how it turned out. After the interviews, we walked to Memorial Union for the symposium. I was a little nervous for this event just because I had never been in that type of situation – presenting a summary of 10 weeks of work in just a few minutes over and over again. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to explain things clearly or well enough to make all the information make sense. The first few times were a little rough, but with practice, it got easier and I figured out a flow. The two hours went by super fasts too. We were also able to bring a demo over to the symposium thanks to the help of Glen and Alex. This way, we could show viewers what our VR experiment actually looked liked and how it worked. Once the symposium was finished, I showed my parents around the VRAC, and did a demo to show what Harrison, Sophie, and I have been working on over these past few weeks. I pulled up LSL to record the Muse stream and Unity event marker stream, Unity to run the experiment, and EEGLAB to visualize the data that we collected from the demo. After this, my parents got back in the car to head home, and I headed back to Freddy because Dr. S invited the Curiosity EEG team over to her house for swimming and dinner over the campfire. Her two daughters came out to join us during dinner, and it was fun just to chat all together for a bit. At around 8:15, we headed back to Freddy because all the interns and some mentors and faculty had plans to go to a park called Peterson Pits for a campfire. Last night was so fun. I’m glad we had that as kinda a last hurrah of the summer with everyone. Paul brought his flame torch which was so funny. So it was all of us interns, Anjali, her boyfriend, her dog, Hunny, and Mieshko. We made s’more’s, chatted, and looked at the stars. They were so amazing last night. When we got back, we just went to bed because that was a long day.