This morning we had our last craft of research session with Yvonne. We pretty much just talked about the different forms of plagiarism and how to avoid them. I think the information I learned today will be very useful when it comes to writing the final research paper considering all the papers we’re planning to use and reference.

After that class, Holly Oberbroeckling spoke with us for the lunch and lecture. I really enjoyed listening to her because she was in our position 10 years ago as an intern here at ISU, so she had a unique and relatable perspective. She began by talking through the actual slides that she and her teammates used for their final presentation. This was helpful because it served as an example of how we can lay out the research we do this summer in a presentation format. 

At one point during the presentation, Holly said that while we’re here, it’s important to learn how to recognize constraints and adapt to them. Her point in saying this was that 10 weeks is not a lot of time at all, so it’s okay if you don’t present groundbreaking results by the end of the program. What really matters is that you still did research (even if you didn’t meet every project goal), you learned, and you had fun. This was really cool to hear because recently I’ve been starting to stress a bit about project goals, and comparing where I’m at to where other people are at in their research. I know this isn’t something I should worry about, but it has been on my mind recently. It just feels like there’s so much to do with the deeper dive projects, the main project, writing the final paper, wanting to spend time with the other interns, and also wanting to go out to explore and learn about more things beyond the assigned projects. Holly’s point definitely is helping me see past this challenge though, because I know that I’m having so much fun, learning so much, and meeting so many amazing people here. I think I just need to focus more on the process; soaking everything in, and abstaining from the comparison.

Anyways, after the lunch and lecture, Sophie, Harrison, and I met with Aron to go over project milestones. Prior to our meeting today, we put together our drafted problem statement, and outlined our literature review so that we could share our thoughts with Aron today. He’s planning to look over our work more in depth to offer suggestions on how to go about including meaningful and enough information to support our research in such a short literature review. We also found MATLAB scripts that we can use to downsample, re-reference, and find the average reference of data, conduct independent component analysis for eye blinking, establish epoch’s, conduct artifact rejection, and run wavelet analysis for the data that we collect via the EEG device. Now that we have a way to interpret the data, we can really get rolling – Aron said we could start working with the VR headset + Muse headband starting next week ! woo ! Exciting !

Tonight we might play some cards, or just chill, or something. We’ll see.