June 7, 2015 (Week 1)

It has officially been a week since my arrival to Aggieland, and I must say that things have been moving faster than I expected! The very first day, I had already accepted an invitation to head out for dinner with some of my fellow REU students. This is unexpected coming from me, as I tend to be extremely shy. I am quite proud of myself because I have kept stepping more and more out of my shell ever since last year. The fact that many of us had already introduced ourselves prior to our arrival to Aggieland might have helped a lot (thank you, social media).

Later during the week, I was introduced to the Sketch Recognition Lab. I met my mentor, Dr. Tracy Hammond, and Graduate Student Mentor, Stephanie Valentine, both of whom I am very excited to work with. Stephanie introduced Angelica (also a DREU participant) and I to KidGab, which is a very fun social network exclusively for girl scouts in Texas. It is also the platform that will allow us to obtain data for our research project. While I did not actually code this week, I did help implement some features to the website and got to help Stephanie with the preparations of two activities: a workshop and a virtual "party" for current KidGab participants. I also participated in my first lab meeting ever, which I was very nervous about, but everyone in the lab was friendly and understanding.

The weekend was a little bit sad, though. I truly miss the freedom of having a car and driving wherever I want to. There are so many things I want to do and places to explore. The apartment is also extremely cold (to me, coming from a tropical island and having never lived with central air conditioning) so I spent most of the weekend in my bed covered in warm sheets. I did manage to stay productive in spite of this: I reviewed HTML/CSS and managed to build my website.

I look forward to what the upcoming weeks have in store for me. :-)