Kayla Dawson projects.vrac.iastate.edu /REU2013/ Posts from me Last Day Posted on August 2, 2013 by kdawson Today was the Research Symposium and our final day at VRAC. I can still clearly remember our first day so it’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 weeks and we are about to leave. From our first social activity at the ropes course I could tell we would be a really tight-knit group. I feel so close to everyone here and I hope they feel the same way about me. Everyone is always welcome to visit me! After all of the action of the past few days it will be weird to go home and relax for a few days but a week from now I’ll be back in Miami starting my new job. Some of my friends in Miami didn’t know what I would do for 10 weeks in Iowa and admittedly I wasn’t too sure either but there hasn’t been a dull moment. I can’t wait to go back to Miami and tell them about all of the activities we’ve done. I can’t get too sentimental in this blog post or I will cry and there are too many cameras around for that. I will really miss Iowa and all of the people I’ve met here. We finally got our picture in the corn today so I’m excited to take that back with me! First day of August Posted on August 1, 2013 by kdawson Last day of work…kind of. Today was our last day of normal work. Tomorrow is going to be craziness! Some of the mentors have already started to leave which is super sad. It will be hard to say goodbye to everyone and even harder to fit all of my stuff back into my suitcases. Admittedly, I’ll be glad to finish up this project and get back to biomedical engineering. This program has given me the confidence to really go for grad school and dive into research. I can’t wait to bring everything I learned here back to UM with me! Out for Lunch Posted on July 31, 2013 by kdawson So when I said we were done with our poster what I really meant was that we are taking a break from our poster because several problems would come up that we would need to fix. Great! That is mostly taken care of now and we are really focusing on the Results and Discussion parts of our paper. Today we went out to lunch with some of our mentors and talked about research, grad school, and life. It’s nice to at least have that conversation going. Even though I don’t know exactly what I want, I at least have people to talk to about it and can hear that my peers don’t have their lives figured out either. One thing I did know is what I wanted for lunch. The dolsot bibimbap was so good! Now I’m fueled up to knock out this paper! Despicable Me Posted on July 30, 2013 by kdawson So today we sent in our final copy of our poster and we are approving it at the printing place in the morning. Yay! Now we just need to finish the paper and prepare for our presentation/demo thing. Our mentors said they think our research was worthwhile…so I’m glad they don’t think this summer was a huge waste of time. I’m pretty happy with what we’ve come up with. 1/14 We also heard from Pam about the HCI grad programs here. The program is really selective. It’s good to know what to expect but it makes me nervous hearing they accept less than 10% of applicants. At the same time, the accepted people are funded so that’s really cool. A group of us went to see Despicable Me 2 which was excellent!!! We had a lot of fun. I’m glad we are still finding time to relax and hang out even as we get close to the end of the program. I hope to stay in touch with a bunch of the people I have met this summer (most likely over Facebook). Also, if you’ve never checked out David Thorne’s blog (http://27bslash6.com/missy.html) I highly recommend you do so! We were talking about him earlier and it reminded me of how funny he is. Beware! He’s also pretty mean…but in a funny way. Data Analysis Posted on July 29, 2013 by kdawson We finished user studies! I can’t explain how relieved I am. If we had more time we would’ve run more to get more significant results but I’m so happy to just be sitting down, working with the numbers. Watching participants complete our cybersickness task was making me really sick. So far the data isn’t looking great but now we know something that doesn’t work to mitigate cybersickness. We also have a task that definitely does induce cybersickness that might be used for future studies. It’s all a learning experience and I’ve learned that I have a weak stomach. Game Night! Posted on July 26, 2013 by kdawson Last night we had a game night here at VRAC. That was so much fun! I got to learn a new game, Dominion, that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone back home who plays it so I’m not sure when I’ll get to play it again. I love how much fun I have with everyone here and how much I learn from them. Yesterday was so much fun it almost felt like the weekend but we’ve got one more hard day of work before paintball on Saturday. Our weekend is actually going to be a lot of work too because we are finishing up user studies and polishing up our paper and poster. I’m not ready for our last weekend in Ames! I Don’t Like Science Posted on July 25, 2013 by kdawson User studies have continued but our research is beginning to make me uncomfortable. When I’m not bored out of my mind I just feel really bad for our participants. I’m trying to keep in mind that all of our participants volunteered so we could make a difference but this really sucks. As a convenient distraction, we are having a game night tonight! We will hopefully have a couple video games and Craig brought a board game that I’ve never played. I can’t wait! Everyone else is going down! I’ve begun insane amounts of trash talk so I pretty much have to destroy everyone. Cathect Posted on July 24, 2013 by kdawson Yesterday I learned a cool word, cathect, which means to invest your feelings or emotions into an idea, object, or person. I think I may have discovered the meaning of life in that word. We are constantly investing parts of ourselves in what we do. Before this summer, I never gave much thought to cybersickness and now I’m completely involved in this project. My entire focus is on seeing it succeed. We’ve also gotten an amazing response when recruiting people for the user studies. People who aren’t working on our project have invested part of themselves in us and our project and want to see us succeed. I can’t explain how grateful I am to have the support of everyone here. We could easily 2/14 have been given an assignment, showed up from 9 to 5, and not developed any relationships with people here. Many internships are like that but not this one. An much as I love Miami, It’s going to be really hard to leave Iowa. It’s going to be really hard to leave the people here. User Studies Posted on July 23, 2013 by kdawson Today we had our first user study! I can’t share the details yet but it went very well! I can’t wait to start looking at the data and see what we come up with! This is real! We’re really doing our study! Excellent Weekend!!! Posted on July 22, 2013 by kdawson This weekend felt super busy but super fun! On Thursday we presented to other REU interns from UPenn and Rutgers. Their research was pretty different from ours and it was cool to see some new projects. We were also a lot more comfortable with our own presentations this time around. Afterwards we all had dinner prepared by Lisa, Paul, and Andrea which was delicious. A bunch of the mentors came so we got to socialize with them outside of VRAC. On Friday we went to Principal Insurance and saw what UX is like in industry. It’s cool to see how some elements of research that we associate with universities are also being used in industry. There are a lot of options for people in these fields. After that we toured the Science Center. I felt just like on of the kids except I didn’t have to convince my parents to buy me astronaut ice cream; I just bought it myself. I loved seeing kids so excited about science. My favorite part, by far, was going into the animal room. I was really excited to touch the snakes and completely fell in love with Puff the hognose snake. The animal-loving wasn’t over yet because on Saturday we went to the Omaha Zoo.