8/17

Final day! Presentation! Finished! Yay!

So as you can read, I did the presentation today, and it went well. I tried to keep my voice very calm, and hopefully, it was.

This internship has been a very interesting experience, and I learned a lot - not only about dealing and communicating with people, but also a lot about Python.

I would like to thank Joe Pow and Bob Callens for giving me the opportunity to be in this internship. And if the other interns are actually reading this (probably not), then I wish you all a good rest of the summer!

8/16

Today my group made a lot of refinements to our presentation. I'm really glad we did a lot of practice. I saw myself improve and become less "stuttery"  along the way.

Tomorrow is the the big day: final presentation.

I can't wait for my presentation to come an end.

8/15

Today I practiced the presentation some more.

The interns came together to have some more peer review and practice.

Our presentations are all getting better.

And that's about it.

8/12

Yesterday (today is Saturday) Maria and I continued working on the presentation. I'm having trouble getting my thoughts through, and I felt really frustrated that I couldn't be concise and clear without my notes. Practice practice practice.

We also spent a lot of time trying to get some videos on our PowerPoint, but we got it in the end.

Then 2:00 came. It was peer review time. And I think I didn't do that well. I really need to practice.

So Maria, Emily (she helped us), and I stayed until 6:30-ish to work on the presentation, and we still need a lot of work.

8/11

Today I wrote scripts for the presentation and practiced saying them.

The interns got together and presented to each other for peer review. I still need a lot of practice.

Drinking hot chocolate now and burning my tongue.

8/10

Today I assigned different slides to my group to work on for the presentation. I have to practice my slides...a lot. I'm not very good at public speaking, so yeah...

I also listened to Dr. Easton's talk today about document restoration. I found it interesting...and long.

...My blogs are getting shorter, aren't they?

8/9

Today I continued on with the presentation and then took a break to learn a bit of calculus.

I'm hoping I can catch Jeff tomorrow to get some videos of the eye into the presentation.

It was fun to prove the derivative of ln(x) (which is (1/x)).

8/8

Today I put some pictures on the PowerPoint and checked how long the presentation would take. It seems we might have enough material.

Then we went to work on the AOIs and decided not to do the AOI for one of the participants because we only have one week left until the presentation.

My throat also kinda hurts right now since I ate a lot of pretzels today.

8/5

I came in early today because of some transportation situations (I arrived around 7:25) and went to the undergraduate breakfast with Maria, Emily, and Niels.

Then I went to listened to some talks. The first talk I went to was something about business, though it was hard to follow since the undergraduate basically read off his PowerPoint that didn't really explain what he was trying to say all too well. But, I suppose it was geared more towards people who actually knew about business, so it makes sense I didn't know what he was trying to say.

The next talk I went to was better. It was more structured and actually told us what the objective of his presentation was. The quick summary of his presentation is that he was trying to find an alloy of silver that would be the toughest and strongest to suit his purposes.

The last talk I went to ended as soon as I entered and sat down. It was literally five minutes, and I was late because the previous one ended a little later. So I didn't get to really hear anything for the third one.

Then I went back to the reading room and worked on the abstract, and later, the AOIs. Then, it was lunch time. By that time, I wasn't feeling too well and when we got to the lunch room, I was seeing white. I walk around for a bit and ran into a wall. Sitting down, I tried looking around, but I couldn't see anything, my vision was all white. Everything was white. So some people came and made sure I was okay and diagnosed it was just dehydration. And Emily was there carrying my lunch with a big cookie in it. I really wanted that cookie.

Eventually, I got to sit in a police car and go back to the imaging science building and ate the cookie. Then my mom picked me up and I went home.

Thanks to Joe Pow, Bob Callens, Emily, and Maria for being there with me.

The cookie was good.

8/4

Today Maria and I finished the note part of the presentation (not including the results). Now we just have to finish the AOIs and get the data to get the results. Also, we refined the abstract and are going to share them with Gabe and Susan for feedback.

After a meeting with Gabe to update him on what we're doing (we also got to see some cool visual reality stuff), I went to work on the AOIs. I am also planning to work on learning some Python when I get home since this internship is a learning experience.

I also scared Emily today. I was walking and saw her, though she didn't see me. I slowly took steps nearer to her, bent down, and next to her ear, I whispered: "hi". She jumped a little.

8/3

Today was a blur to me since I had a headache for most of the day. I'll do the list again:
1.) Worked on presentation
2.) Worked on AOI
3.) Ate pizza for lunch
4.) Listened to a talk about a lake in Africa. It was interesting how so many fields came together: the elevation of the lake (geography), its history (earth science), how lava flow disrupts the biodiversity of the lake while killing off a lot of people by releasing a massive amount of CO2  from the bottom of the lake (biology and chemistry, respectively), how we could take advantage of the released gases by converting them into energy(energy), and so on.
5.) Went back to working on the presentation.
6.) Went to take part in an experiment, but had to reschedule it for tomorrow.
7.) Met with Susan and talked about what we should include and exclude from our presentation.
8.) Met with Gabe and planned to meet again tomorrow to update him on what we're doing.
9.) Had hot chocolate.
10.) Watched movie.

And finally brought home the sausages from last Friday.

8/2

Today I started working on the PowerPoint for the final presentation. First, I made a very broad skeleton based on the outline (see Maria's blog) that we made. Then, I made notes on the second slide (the first slide is just a title slide) on what we would say during the presentation. Three paragraphs (not very long ones) took a very long time. This was since I wrote the general idea of what I wanted to say, rewrote it so that it wasn't awkward to speak (since formal writing doesn't fit with formal talking), rewrote it so that it flowed better with how I spoke, rewrote it so that it was concise and easy to follow, rewrote it, and rewrote it so many times for each and every paragraph. Basically, I rewrote the paragraphs a lot. And I still want to rewrite them and change the order of some paragraphs. The purpose of this is so that the presentation flows with minimal confusions.

I also, if you didn't notice, stopped working on Python since it would be a better use of time to do other things instead of learning all the code that is required to create the virtual gallery we would be using for our experiment when Nate already knows how to do it. I realize the point of this internship is to learn new things, but because we still have to interpret the data that we still have to filter through, do another part of the experiment, and interpret the data from that part of the experiment, we don't have a lot of time on our hands. And even with the things we are doing, that is a learning experience in itself. So instead, we decided that Nate will make the gallery while Maria continue on the AOIs while I work on the presentation.

8/1

Today I continued with Python.

And that's it.