My summer experience at the University of Minnesota ~ Sara Lahr
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 10: July 26 - August 1Journal
I took the GRE on Monday. I wasn't extremely nervous, but I did have the necessary amount of nerves to help me concentrate. The test was not as bad as I thought it was going to be, and the great thing about the computer version is that the scores on the verbal and quantitative are reported immediately after. I am very satisfied with my scores; I performed better than I did on either of the practice tests. I actually got the exact score that I had set as my goal! I was ecstatic afterwards. I like knowing that I won't have to retake it. Now all I have to do is start making some decisions about graduate school...
We relocated the Scribblers to the undergraduate robotics lab. We set up the final environment, ready to test our new fully integrated code. Unfortunately, we learned all the problems that come with moving robots to an environment different from where we tested them. The week was spent fixing bugs and coming up with ways to get around new problems. I really want to start running experiments, but we still haven't reached that point. Now we only have one week to hopefully pull everything together. Wow.
Maria is going on vacation on Monday, so Friday was our last day with her. We all went out to eat, and afterwards she came back to the lab to see our progress. I was pretty disappointed that we were not able to show her more, but I think she understood the issues we were having with switching environments. Still, I wish I could have ended the summer on a slightly more successful note. We have one more week, and hopefully in that time we will have collected some video to show. Maria was a very encouraging and understanding mentor, and I am sad to see her go. I guess it is the first of many goodbyes of the summer.