Interface Implementation Part 1

My Week In Three Words: Insightful, supportive, and a bit of nerves

What I’ve been working on: This week I’ve been working on refining our survey and the implementation of mock-ups as well as preparing to present the work I’ve done this summer at the this showcase/show and tell event our REU group hosted. In terms of refining our survey, I’ve been working on reordering sections, revising wording, and referencing papers I read earlier this summer about how to ask users about marginalized identities. An interesting detail I observed while doing this was that there should be check boxes rather than mutliple choice optionis provided to participants when asking about racial and gender identity as well as checkboxes. For the show and tell event, I prepared a 5-6 minute talk about why we chose our project and what we’re hoping to get out of it. I have also linked the slides below. Although I was nervous to do this talk in front of all the other interns who by the way were doing such interesting work, I learned a lot from this experience and have more confidence in my ability to give this type of presentation in the future.

What I’ve learned:

1. When giving any sort of presentation, it’s important to know your audience. When I first made my REU presentation, I had several slides on the nitty-gritty work of my project and was advised by my advisor and team to restructure the talk to be more about the story of the project rather than the details that the other interns and professors likely wouldn’t care about.
2. Another tip I got from my talk was to avoid using words like “basic/logical/obvious” since that can make listeners feel dumb for not being confused even though they might have a good point. Personally I have a habit of using “basic” when giving speeches, so this is a skill I really want to work on in the future!
3. If you create presentations on Google slides a lot like me, (Slidesgo)[https://slidesgo.com/] is a really great resource. You can find a theme for free and make a copy of it for your presentation.

What I’m curious about:

1. A lot of the other REU interns had yet to launch their experiments or studies. I’m very curious to learn about the results of all their projects!