Week 1: May 30 - June 3

This is the end of my first week, and it has flown by so quickly! On Sunday, my mom and I drove from my home in Scottsdale, Arizona, to another desert paradise, Albuquerque, New Mexico. I moved into student housing at the University of New Mexico, and spent the rest of Sunday and Monday getting situated in this new environment. Tuesday was my first day, and it was mainly spent getting all of the pesky keys, cards, and everything else necessary for life on a college campus. I also met my mentor, Professor Lydia Tapia, and the two graduate students I will be working with this summer, John and Latha. By Wednesday, everything was situated, and Andrea, another DREU intern, and I started getting acquainted with some of the programs we will be working with this summer. We practiced generating roadmaps, or various paths around a room, that a robot could use to maneuver from a starting point to an ending point. I altered some of the node-generation parameters, such as the number of nodes, and the number of neighbors each node should try to connect to. This was just a starting point, however, and we moved on to working with a more complicated object: proteins, what we will be working with the rest of the summer. Proteins are more complicated because every type of protein bends in different ways, the angles found in proteins bend in different ways, and some have both flexible and rigid areas. Along with practicing generating roadmaps, we began to learn how to use VI and reviewed some of the unix commands. We also began working on our websites. Although I don’t know what my specific project will be this summer, I am excited to continue working on Monday!