Six weeks in: Looking back and looking forward
How have six weeks passed already?! This semester seems to be flying by, as is this research internship. I want time to slow down a bit now (that reminds me of the time perception project that Rebecca, another research intern, is working on)…
Looking back on the last week, I have to say that it was quite a stressful time. I don’t think it was just me, either; people in my tutorials for other subjects seemed worn out and listless, probably experiencing a similar onslaught of mid-session exams and assignments. Other research interns were, like me, struggling to get their draft proposals done by the deadline. But 5pm on Friday would come, and come too quickly. I don’t feel too good about the proposal that I submitted (at literally 5 o’clock), but I’m glad that it’s in and I can move forward with revision, revision, and more revision.
Writing down to the wire made me appreciate what we learnt in the Week 4 writing workshop. Starting to write early on can hardly be a bad thing; I think it takes out a lot of the stress experienced as the days pass you by and yet you’re still staring blankly at your Word document (which is also blank). I also liked the idea about making notes on the papers you read as you go along, using something like an Excel spreadsheet where you can put information like research questions, methodology and key findings into different columns — which makes it easier to synthesise it all. I have a tendency to write with a gazillion PDFs of different papers open at the same time; the constant ctrl-tabbing between them and frenzied scrolling to relevant bits is probably not the best way to do things.
Looking back a bit further and thinking about the internship in general, I’m thankful for the experience that I’ve had so far. My supervisor (Peter), the post-doc in the lab (Jess), and the Honours student (David) whose project is closely connected with mine, have all been very friendly and helpful. Honestly, it was (and still is) a daunting experience for me, because I feel so out of my depth when it comes to my research topic (generalisation of associative learning). Not only did I remember just the barest of basics about associative learning from PSYC2081; I was also lost when it came to the various associative, inductive reasoning and Bayesian models that are relevant to my project.
But it’s been great to explore this area of psychology, and be able to talk things over with my supervisor and the others in the lab — even if I sometimes feel embarrassed by my own ignorance. Well, it’s all about the learning process, isn’t it? I also enjoyed the experience of creating my own post-experiment questionnaire on Qualtrics. (How great is Qualtrics, by the way?)
I’m disappointed that I can’t attend the human learning lab meetings; they just happen to be on when I have an all-important statistics tutorial. But I do sometimes attend the cognition lab meetings. It’s great to see lecturers and other academics outside the context of lectures — talking about their research, giving each other feedback. The Real World of Research is pretty fascinating.
Looking forward, I’m excited to finally get started with testing! I’ve put up my first timeslots for the coming Tuesday. Having done quite a bit of testing in the past, the experience won’t be entirely novel to me, but I’m really excited to start data collection for my own project. I’m also looking forward to the point when the data is ready to analyse; Jess and David mentioned that they used R to do their data analysis (and that once you use R, you never go back), so I’m hoping to learn that as well.
I’m also looking forward to reading my peers’ draft proposals (everyone’s projects sound so interesting!), and both giving and receiving some valuable feedback. I want to do a bit more work on my proposal before showing it to my supervisor, so I’m aiming to work on it consistently over the next week.
Hope that you’re all travelling well! See you at the feedback workshop next Tuesday.
Until next time,
Sharon
