Frantic First Week
After a relatively easy move-in, I started work on Monday, May 12. I had a long list of things that I had to do to get setup as an employee of IU Bloomington. I explored campus while running around to accomplish these tasks.
At lunchtime, the lab had a work meeting and I met my co-workers and boss, Dr. Camp. We went to lunch at Taste of India. The buffet was traditional Indian cuisine and tasted like the dishes that I have made at home using Indian cookbooks.
At the end of the week, I received my IU card. I could put everything on that card: dorm access, lab access, and money. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up with the food money and it was not cleared up by the weekend. So, I lived on Annie's microwavable macaroni cups and cereal.
At lunchtime, the lab had a work meeting and I met my co-workers and boss, Dr. Camp. We went to lunch at Taste of India. The buffet was traditional Indian cuisine and tasted like the dishes that I have made at home using Indian cookbooks.
At the end of the week, I received my IU card. I could put everything on that card: dorm access, lab access, and money. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up with the food money and it was not cleared up by the weekend. So, I lived on Annie's microwavable macaroni cups and cereal.
So, in this part I'll talk about the more academic side of what I learned first week. Even though I had completed IRB training at University of Alabama, I had to redo it for IUB. Luckily, most of the modules transferred over.
The IRB training I took is for people who research with human subjects. It is a certification to make sure that researchers are informed about proper procedures in handling that type of research.
At the Monday lunch meeting, we discussed projects that the lab was working on. I chose to work on the passwords and certificates projects. I was interested in how to create strong memorable passwords using visual cues and what people think digital certificates are.
Jacob, one of the grad students, had made a password creation website that used images. I played around with it in order to learn more about JavaScript and CSS. I had never worked with websites before so that was really interesting.
Many of the lab members attended a workshop about qualitative data analysis. Because some of our projects are surveys, we have free-response data that needs to be organized. We completed first order coding on some adult survey responses on what they believe digital certificates do.
For first order coding, we gave "codes" to the responses people had for the question "What is a certificate?" One example could be
Answer: Encrypts files and sends them to website
Code: file encryption, sending files
It was very interesting seeing the layman's view of a common computer security theme.
The IRB training I took is for people who research with human subjects. It is a certification to make sure that researchers are informed about proper procedures in handling that type of research.
At the Monday lunch meeting, we discussed projects that the lab was working on. I chose to work on the passwords and certificates projects. I was interested in how to create strong memorable passwords using visual cues and what people think digital certificates are.
Jacob, one of the grad students, had made a password creation website that used images. I played around with it in order to learn more about JavaScript and CSS. I had never worked with websites before so that was really interesting.
Many of the lab members attended a workshop about qualitative data analysis. Because some of our projects are surveys, we have free-response data that needs to be organized. We completed first order coding on some adult survey responses on what they believe digital certificates do.
For first order coding, we gave "codes" to the responses people had for the question "What is a certificate?" One example could be
Answer: Encrypts files and sends them to website
Code: file encryption, sending files
It was very interesting seeing the layman's view of a common computer security theme.