Journal
June, July, August.June
Week One: 6-8 to 6-12
This week I have been getting settled. The first day was chaos. We had to get our keys, parking passes, IDs, and I could not get onto the wireless network.
I did get my computer and work space in the lab though! We went out to lunch with the "DREU crew" at an authentic Irish Pub on main street. Eventually it calmed down and we got working.
On Tuesday we learned about LaTex and how to do background research in our topic. We were assigned different conferences, journals and workshops to look into.
Throughout the week I have been working on a literature search, and creating a bibtex of references. I also started learning about HTML so I could make this webpage. On Wednesday my wireless on my laptop finally worked and I was able to be very productive.
The Main part of that day was structuring this web page. This meant I needed a CSS template, a general idea of what I wanted and all of my information. I also went out to lunch with my entire lab and another computer science lab at a Mexican restaurant!
Thursday I had finally gathered most of my references, but I needed to create a lot of BibTex for them. I also had reading to do on relevant papers that my mentor has assigned me. We then met as a group and began to break down the structure of a research paper since we will be writing one at the end of this summer.
Friday I organized all my references and began uploading them using the terminal into the correct BibTex format. Since I had never done this before I had to learn everything it took awhile to get a hand of it. Last, but certainly not least, our mentors have been introducing us to the project we will be doing this summer.
I cannot wait to start the research!
Week Two: 6-15 to 6-19
This week I am getting started in the research! Monday I finally printed out my LaTex and BibTex of references. We then met as a group to see if we have any overlapping references, and to see how we wanted to group them. The student members of the team spent the morning brainstorming about our data models and what information we needed from the user sessions.
On Tuesday after one of our mentor's went through our BibTex and the other Mentor went over our web pages, I spent the morning using their edits to fix both my BibTex and my web page up. I then had to copy my BibTex into a shared file so we could merge all of our references together. I spend the rest of the day in another brainstorming session, editing my web page and familiarizing myself with our project. That night we went to Dr. Pollock's house for a picnic with the lab. It was so much fun and the food was delicious!
Wednesday has been a relaxed day. I have been going over my web page, adding new bibtex files and just reading up on our project. Thursday we really started to delve into the research. At first I was pretty rusty with writing my program code, but after a little while it all came back to me. I was able to write three programs that will help analyze our data!Friday I continued writing programs to analyze our user sessions, and created some graphs to display what I have found! We also did a lunch as a lab, which was pretty fantastic!
Week Three: 22-26
This week I am getting more invovled in the research. Monday I brainstormed some on how to check our data. I edited some of my programs, and added a couple aspects to them. After lunch Camille and I traded seats to read through each others code. In the afternoon we met with our mentors to discuss what we've been doing and where we go from here.
Tuesday we met in the morning with out mentors. They asked us to go over and evaluate what we have done with our brainstorm. We also discussed in depth what goes into an introduction so we can start writing our paper. After that I wrote another script. Went out to lunch with Camille and some of my friends from HS. After that it was back to the lab to work!
Wednesday was a little bit frustrating. I worked a lot on our introduction, made more graphs and updated the wiki which is all good! After lunch though I was stumped by some code I need to Write!
Thusday has been mostly about writing the paper. I also wrote some more scripts! We were supposed to decorate t-shirts, but haven't yet!