This week I fully finalized and had submitted the required IRB forms and papers to get my project approved.
This day I had a quick meeting with my grad student partner of sorts (the relationship is so I have another dedicated person to whom I can go with questions).
Afterward I reported to another of the lab's grad students my IRB Protocol and Consent forms are ready to be reviewed, and they will get to it when they get the chance. With hope, they will have gotten to it sooner as opposed to later so I may continue forwarding my work.
Afterward the lab had a lab-wide meeting. The lab has gone two weeks without a meeting and also today is the first day for three new members; it was a meeting for sure. In this new quarter (the next scholastic year quarter has started today) the lab has two weekly meetings: Mondays each member is assigned their work for the week, Fridays each member goes over what they accomplished over the week. The meetings from last quarter have been split in two, in effect. I think this format will work better, since two two-hour meetings a week is a more standable style than one four-hor meeting once a week. Hopefully they will not stay so long for long.
This day I and the project manager met with the lab director to hammer out all the details I needed to finish and send the IRB Protocol and Consent forms to the lab director for review. I then finished up and sent those forms to them.
This day I finished as much I could the IRB papers the lab will be submitting for my project. All that is left to do is for the director to review and make edits for themself and then submit everything to the IRB.
This day I and the rest of the lab had a web-meeting with the company behind our new DAQ software we now use for experiments. The company's representitive talk about how it is used and answered some questions we had for them.
Then I filled out forms stating no, I do not have a conflict of interest with the research I will be doing. These forms are the last thing I can do before the lab submits my project to the IRB for approval.
This day I attended the lab-wide weekly "what did you do this week?" meeting. Since this is the last one we had since my first week, I talked about my n-back task presentation program and about the IRB papers I've put together in the last few weeks.
The packet was submitted before the next day (July 1st) because the host university will have changed its IRB approval process on that day and the lab director does not want to have to spend more time than necessary to get my project approved and moving along.