Now that we are in week six of the REU, we are finally starting to develop our interface for the experiment for NAVI. This is a really exciting moment, but it’s also super hard and frustrating.

With personal projects, I’ve often found that the middle is the hardest part. You begin the project with all of this excitement, but once you start to settle in, you realize that there are a lot of roadblocks you didn’t foresee, and that it will take a lot longer than you initially thought. This research project is very much the same. Despite technically having ~4 weeks left, it really feels more like we only have 1 week of actual time to get this entire UI working with CARLA (our car simulator of choice). That’s not much time to learn a new piece of software.

My initial reaction is to spend more time with the project after hours, but I just did that over the last week with my deeper dive, and it has left me feeling very tired about that project. And with 4 weeks to go, I really don’t want that same feeling with the main research project. Despite all my frustration, I’m still super glad that I get to work on this project, and I’m looking forward to see how it turns out!

Holly Oberbroeckling (our luncheon lecture guest last week) mentioned this cycle as well, and in her graph she depicted the graph ending with you being exciting about the project again. Hopefully that will reflect on our project as well. Holly also shared a lot of other super helpful industry knowledge, about the joys and frustrations of working with others in her company. Obviously I would love to have a job perfectly suited to what I like in the future, but unfortunately that probably won’t happen, so it is kind of nice to know that other people like Holly are experiencing that as well, but are still able to enjoy their jobs.