Rainy day reflections
The day before yesterday, I found out that my supervisor has been diagnosed with a serious illness and is beginning treatment immediately. It’s one of those things that feels unreal, and yet all too terribly, crushingly real at the same time. It reminds me of a phrase that I once read: lightning from an empty blue sky. I wondered if I should even write about this here, but thought that it would be odd not to when it’s weighing so heavily on my mind. I’m not sure what else to say, though. Just that I can only hope everything will go well with his treatment. It sounds so trite…
Well, I guess it’s good that we’ve all made it to this point in the internship; our research proposals are in (not without some pain, but you know what they say about pain and gain), and our projects are well and truly under way — with some people finished with data collection and moving on to the stage where you try and figure out what it all means. Me, I’m still trying to test more participants; as Ray mentioned in his previous post, the sign-up rate has been slow — so slow that I actually feel lucky to get one or two sign-ups a day.
Nonetheless, on an average day at uni I spend nearly all my non-class time in Mathews 201 (a veritable dungeon, but I like it there). While waiting for the next participant, I sit at “my” computer and work on assignments, or more realistically, do less productive things, like napping and browsing Reddit. I’ve grown quite accustomed to the experimenting lifestyle, if you can call it that. I suppose it’s good preparation for Honours testing as well. A PhD student once told me that it’s important to learn how to do work, to be productive, in those snippets of time when your participants are doing the experiment and don’t need you. I think it’s true, because those minutes do add up, in the end.
Like Tegan, I also really enjoy talking to participants — whether about the actual research with those who are curious, or about how they’re finding Psychology 1B and psych in general, what their interests are, and so on. Sometimes I also recommend taking this internship course when they get to third-year. I especially like having these interactions because I remember that as a first-year participant I would generally feel a bit uncomfortable around the experimenters. I guess it’s just a weird social context to be in, so making things warmer and more casual at the end is a good way to go, I think.
Although it feels like things should be winding down after the proposal submission, there’s plenty to be getting on with. Presentations are little more than two weeks away — now, isn’t that a scary thought? I haven’t even made a start on mine, which would probably be really concerning if I wasn’t rather relieved at the moment to be done with other assessments. It seems like it’ll be nerve-wracking to present in front of people who are probably going to tear you apart afterwards (but you know, in a nice way). At the same time, it’s another valuable experience we get as part of this internship, and I’m sure that it’ll feel rewarding to present our research in front of our peers and a bunch of academics — it’s very different from a Turnitin submission that only ever gets seen by two pairs of eyes, that’s for sure. And I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s presentations, especially since there’s such a diverse range of projects being undertaken.
My agenda for the near future is to start analysing my data. I’m going to try to use R — not sure if I’ll have a lot of time to learn it and play around to get what I need, but I’ll see how it goes. I’ll also need to start working on my presentation — I expect that the workshop on Tuesday will be very helpful in terms of letting us know what we’ve been doing wrong all these years, presentation-wise. And I’ll probably meet up with Jenny, who along with my supervisor’s post-doc will be take over as my supervisors for the remainder of the internship (something that I’m thankful for).
What about you? How are you all going, and how are you feeling as we get closer and closer to the end of semester?
Hope you’re having a cosy weekend amidst this chilly weather,
Sharon
