This week with research, I found new ways of summarizing and presenting data. The main highlight of this week was being able to gather the data that I’ve been collecting for my temperature experiments and present it to my PI. The main change I made to the data was how to present it in a heat graph, which I first mistakenly labeled as an intensity graph. My mentor came back from his break this week, so he was able to guide me on how he made his previous graphs using a code he wrote in MATLAB, which is another new program that I am kind of learning from scratch. I’m so glad he taught me to use this program because if I were to use it by myself I would have gone through a much longer process of trying to figure it out. Just knowing what the right questions to ask would have taken me a while. I was considering going a different route in Excel that was easier for me but also quite long and tedious to do. I’m so glad that he was able to show me because he saved me a lot of time and it allowed me to learn more directly how to interpret and display data in a more interesting and effective way, as I did with the heat graphs. This way I also do not miss out on using MATLAB as a tool. This experience also highlighted how different it has been these past few weeks, noticing how before, I was working much more independently and figuring out how to make things work. Now, that he got back, we are able to do certain things much faster because he has gone through this process already. This way, I wouldn’t have to dedicate so much time to figuring things out, especially programs I am not familiar with, but I get to see both worlds of being super independent and getting more help in the process, so I appreciate the benefits of learning how to troubleshoot on my own and learning from mentorship.
With this, I was able to present my data to my mentor and PI in a subgroup meeting. It seemed to go well. They were very interested in my data and where it was going. Although the generator doesn’t seem to be very efficient right now, there are still a lot of changes and research to do in the future so I look forward to doing them.
This is also a short week so I’m happy to get a break. I was a little concerned because I was thinking that I was running out of time a bit, but I have some data that I feel more comfortable with for now. This recent meeting made me feel a little more hopeful about where I’m at in terms of time, but I know I still have more work ahead. I would like more data, but I may also need to analyze my current data even more. I need to think more about how I’m going to tell the story of my whole research for presentations.