After six weeks, we are nearing the end of our program, and the preparation for the poster session begins. Thus far, I have a working version of my model. However, like a paper, research is never truly complete. There are always things that I can optimize or add to make my model even better. For instance, I cannot run more than 100 neuron fibers in my model right now because I don’t have enough memory on my computer. However, when I employ better programming techniques, I believe that I might be able to employ over double that many fibers. This will bring me closer to the physiologically real numbers of fibers we are working with.
Even though my project is this far, there were hiccups on my road to success. For instance two weeks ago I worked the entire week to run my code that timed out after completing 97% of the work every time. This was frustrating because I had to wait half a hour every time I ran my code. It would have been fine if my code worked, but every time it crashed until I realized that I could reduce my data set’s size and run my code in ten minutes. There are other stories like this one where I couldn’t figure out what to do, but in the end I worked at my problem and found an answer through trial and error.
This summer has been rewarding so far because of the tangible accomplishments I have made in the lab. Also, I have learned so much about science . However, the greatest lesson I have learned is that science doesn’t work on the first try, you need to try a lot of times to succeed.
