Finished the first draft of the poster and I'm actually really happy with it! Explaining all of this in human terms has been an especially big challenge for me, and this was a great excercise to work on that. When the conference rolls around, the "elevator speech" will be another story, but we'll get to that when it comes! Hopefully we can also get more feedback on this during the general department meeting on Friday.
With additional feedback from Lenore and others in the group, I spent the morning making small tweaks to the poster. In the afternoon, we did a code review on everything Thomas and I have worked on this summer. Having all of the major scripts in the repository and (mostly) well-documented helped a TON! Even so, I'm sure it will be difficult to manage all of this after we leave. We tried a LOT of different confidence methods, and have a lot of intermediary scripts rather than one giant software package. It will be fine, but I hope we left things in an okay state!
Today I moved on to writing the paper and helping Thomas fix an unexplained git repository error. We are now pushing to two repositories - a local git repository and a public github repository (the same one I mentioned before). This is so I can work on the code if need be once I leave and my Tufts account is closed. Busy day!
Continued working on the paper today, and I'm finding that copying the organization from the poster is NOT going to work. In retrospect it would have been great to work on the paper first and then the poster. Ah, well... hindsight is 20/20. Tomorrow is my last day already and I can hardly believe it!
Crazy, today is the last day already! I continued working on the paper in the morning, and then Lenore graciously offered to take us all out to lunch. We went to the Elephant Walk, and I would highly recommend it! There was a great gluten free menu, and I actually looked up a recipe for the dish I ordered. After lunch, I focused on the paper again with a renewed sense of organization and goals. It won't be finished before I leave, but Lenore and I agreed to exchange comments and drafts via email.
Overall, I am so happy to have had this experience! This summer has been even better than I imagined, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I owe a HUGE thank you to Lenore for all of her support, guidance, and kindness through this research journey, along with Thomas, Prof. Ben Hescott, Tony, and Inbar. I also am indebted to Professor Maria Gini for encouraging me to apply for DREU. And of course, none of this would be possible without DREU's sponsors. Thank you so, so much!
Headed home! See ya Boston and Tufts!