Mid-Way Through the Program!

My Week In Three Words: Planning and Goal Check-in

What I’ve been working on: This week I’ve been meeting with my mentors to check-in on how the program is going as well as updating my own goals. After meeting with my mentors and my project team, we decided that for our project, a good goal by the end of the summer would be to have our survey done and ready to send out as well as having a good section of the paper written out up to the results section. I also talked with my mentor about me staying on after the summer ends to help out with finishing the project–which is quite exciting for me since this is my first computer science research project! Personally, my overarching goal for this summer was to connect with those in the HCI research space and understand what the day-to-day of doing research is. So far, I’ve connected with not only everyone on my project, but also with people in the greater University of Washington community doing HCI research. I’ve been trying to meet at least 1-2 people through short connections a week and it’s been going great so far. I also went to a presentation from Stefania Druga on her paper: How do children’s perceptions of machine intelligence change when training and coding smart programs?. Finally, toward the end of the week I worked on filling out our IRB form for our study and figuring out how to best select our sampling of commments from the dataset we were working with. I also got started on writing up our study design and studying how we should implement the user interface with React.

What I’ve learned:

1. Clockify is a great tool to keep track of your time! I heard of this tool from a mentor and personally love the Chrome extension version.
2. I heard of the book Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) by Susan Bloom and it’s a brilliant read. Grades don’t apply to my work at the moment, but the self-driven learning I’ve done this summer definitely relates to a lot of the problems raise in this book. As a high-achieving student, I’ve struggled with prioritizing learning over the sense of achievement I get when I “get the grade.” My ongoing challege to myself is to ask this: Why are you learning this? What will matter in 5, 10 years? How are you learning this–by memorizing it or understanding the how the concept works?

What I’m curious about:

1. There’s this idea that we have 3-4 golden hours of the day where we can think about difficult problems before getting fatigued. Is that actually true?
2. What are the tradeoffs of working in a research project with multiple people vs just you and your advisor or alone? How do you decide on who to bring into a research project?