You know, going into this… I knew it was not an internship, it was a research fellowship. Julie Hoover, Ryan Theurer, and I had yelled jokes about it as he had left the Geology (where we were diligently working on our HASP payload) this summer, Abandoning us to go to his internship at some no-name NASA facility. So, I knew I would be a fellow doing research and experimental work on the NASA Swarmathon platform. However, what I did not realize was that this was a RESEARCH fellowship. On the first day, it became stunningly apparent that for at least the first third of this 8 week stint, my fellow fellows and I were going to be doing a lot of research and annotated bibliographies, while doing very little actual programming.
After day 3, I felt very lucky to have had an English teacher like Sonny Haynes. Thanks to him, I did not feel like I was unprepared to do what needed to be done. His teaching style and his presence always pushed me to be better at both research and writing. The fact that I had done a multitude of annotated bibliographies before had greatly prepared me for the first part of the internship. And while it is probably a general require of the Durham Tech English department to teach and do what he did, I felt particularly prepared because of Mr. Haynes.
And while I may not be entirely fond of research, I do feel like I am more prepared than EVER to tackle the challenges of Swarm Robotics thanks for the research that my mentor Dr. Jason Isaacs is having us do. So, like the many snails in the photo above, I slowly slug towards my goal of actually getting to write some code. Some well researched, and thoroughly thought out, code.