Extension: Week One

Hello from Madison Wisconsin! I have just finished my first full week here in Madison and so far I am enjoying myself. This first week has been pretty slow: I've been getting to know people in the lab, getting acquainted with the town, settling into my living space, and reading an endless list of papers. 

There are a couple things I want to mention first that pertain to the CREU project. First, I heard back from Grace Hopper and they accepted my poster proposal, unfortunately Tapia and Grace Hopper happen at the same time and we have already accepted the poster presentation at Tapia so I had to decline the offer from Grace Hopper. Secondly, Erick and I did eventually finish the final report for the CREU project and it is attached below.

Moving on to this summer, I will continue working with Erick and Professor Brumberg in conjunction with Professor Beckage to finish our proposal and hopefully write a joint paper, but I will also be working on a new project with Professor Beckage that she is currently receiving funding for with Professor Austerweil at the University of Wisconsin. So, I will do my best to schedule my time so I am working on both projects and Professor Beckage suggested I try a 30-70 split (70 for the new project). I am not sure if this will be enough time committed to the CREU extension (I may make it a 40-60 split) but I will do my best to get in enough time for useful growth. One aspect of being in Madison is that work on the CREU project will be easier because I am in direct daily contact with Professor Beckage, so this should help the pace and quality of work for this summer. 

I have not been in touch with Professor Brumberg and Erick since I left, but I am planning on emailing them this week to work out a weekly meeting time over Skype to keep in contact with them and also keep me accountable for my end of the project.

This coming work week I will be doing some more reading for my DREU project and meeting with Professor Austerweil, I will be catching up with the CREU project and what I need to do next, and I will be meeting several new students and professors that are part of the PREP (Psychology Research Experience Program) summer program. I am not part of this program, however the advisers for the program are allowing me to join in their activities since I am here by myself. So, I think this will give me a chance to really branch out in this new field and meet some amazing new people. 

Lastly, one of the requirements for the DREU program is to create a web page for my project that can later be hosted on the CRA-W website, so I have hosted a web page on GitHub (previously used for a Software Engineering class group project ... oh well!) to hold my content for that project. Below is a link to the page, and I am thinking that later I will move the content back here to stay consistent.

CREU Final Report: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/953dc3_5c77be77c4434dbe8dae29213b93edd7.pdf

DREU Blog: https://rebekahmanweiler.github.io/

Week Thirty-six

Quite a bit has happened this week! On Saturday, Erick and I participated in the Undergraduate Research Symposium where we each gave separate presentations on our work this semester. My research talk was titled "Exploring the Network Structure of Child Directed Speech" and was a high level overview of the project, its goals, and my initial results. Below is a PDF of my presentation slides as well as a picture my mom took during my presentation (Thanks mom!).

Also during this week, I found out that Professor Beckage and I were accepted into the Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) funded by the CRA-W. I will be getting in touch with Professor Beckage soon so we can discuss our plans for the summer. I still plan on working with Erick and Professor Brumberg even if I leave to work with Professor Beckage in Madison Wisconsin, and will be updating this blog in conjunction with Erick's over the summer. Hopefully, we will be able to write a joint paper to be published in a journal later this year.

Lastly, we also found out that Erick's and my poster application to the Tapia conference was accepted! So, we will both be traveling to Orlando, Florida this coming September to present our joint research project.

This summer is going to be jam-packed with research and I am so excited to get started! But, next week is finals week, which I will need to prepare for, Erick and I still need to write our final report, and the following weeks may be busy with planning and packing for my trip to Madison. So, it may be a while until my next post. Until then, a big thank you to the CRA-W for this amazing opportunity and to our professors Nicole Beckage and Jon Brumberg for all of their help and guidance through this year and the times to come. We will never forget it!

KU Undergraduate Research Symposium Presentation: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/953dc3_5ae4fa4399204e3594ac469302968bc2.pdf

Week Thirty-five

Well, I've gotten a lot of feedback and will run my presentation by Professor Brumberg one more time and present on Saturday! I've been getting kinda stressed and haven't been able to do any more research this week beyond running my code to get the nodes' neighbors and realizing that there was something wrong. So, I guess we will see what happens next week.