Throughout the 8-week program I have learned a ton in the lab. Coming in never having worked on an independent research project and never having even opened the MATLAB program, I was in a little over my head. I quickly realized that this would not be like the research internships I did in high school, which involved me working so closely beside someone with a lot more experience than I that I was effectively in a shadowing position while they did the real work. Here there was no one to hold my hand, and there was definitely a learning curve.
The first few weeks I found myself browsing MATLAB forums for hours never really retaining or learning anything, and my project made little progress. I picked up a study guide from a friends CS class and read it from cover to cover, just to familiarize myself with some of the language, but I soon realized that the specificity of this project extended far past the scope of any intro to MATLAB course. The more progress I made, however, the quicker I was making progress, in a snowball-like effect, and soon things started to click.
It wasn’t really until weeks 5 and 6 that I started to generate working code, and it wasn’t until week 7 that I was ready to start generating data. This gave me roughly 5 days to generate all of my data, analyze the results and put together a poster. I spent so many hours at work in those 5 days that I felt like I was back in second semester reading period preparing for finals. Now that my poster is done, however, I’m starting to appreciate how valuable an experience it was. It was an entirely different kind of research from what I had experience with, but I found myself enjoying it a lot near the end.
I’m still not sure what part of my future research will take, but this helped assure me in my decision to transfer into Pratt and pursuer engineering, and opened my eyes to new career paths and opportunities.
It’s been a pleasure, hope you all have enjoyed my series of blog posts half as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Farewell,
Matt
