We made it to the first week!

Meeting the interns and the mentors I’ll be working with has been so exciting. Everyone is from a different US state which is exciting, as I’m hoping to learn from their various geographical backgrounds. This morning the girls in the group walked to get coffee before work and it was a beautiful walk. The first day, we took a tour of the campus, it’s really green and lacky and I were talking about how it almost seems like one of those picturesque quaint places in a movie. We got to check out the lab and our desks which was exciting and made everything feel much more real.

We also talked about what HCI really means, how it shows up in our lives as students, and why it’s so important. As an exercise for this, we were told to design an app with a certain purpose, mine was an app that tracked bad/good habits, and we had 7 minutes to draw various interface ideas. At the end, we compared them to people who had been given the same initial idea to emphasize how people approach design elements differently.

At the end of the day we all walked to the sand volleyball court near our dorm and played for a while which was definitely a highlight of my time so far!

Today, we met out project mentors and got to talk about our actual projects. For me, that’s Cyberscore, and we discussed the true impact of VR and its potential in various fields such as medicine, education, and military. It’s so exciting to be working on research that is at the forefront of innovation and I can’ wait to start building our plan for developing this scorecard. I’m also eager to start our short courses next week and see what hooks me so I can start working on the deeper dive!

I’m just getting back from lunch with my project team. We went to a Brazilian food place and it was nice because we got to know each other and talk about our interest in CS and VR more in-depth.

I’m eager to start learning Unity, work on code with my team, and see how the rest of the project goes!