It is finally the last week! Can’t wait to be done with work and take a break. Somehow I already start to miss it as I won’t have meaningful days going on. However, I keep busy coding a new project with a friend of mine called SES (a temporary name), spend more time on my piano, and work out more. I also will have only one more chance at the Dance On The Assembly Row event before I go back to RIT, so I can’t wait for that as a couple of my friends will be there.

For the week, we continued interviewing more people. Some of which are my friends, and some others are my teammate’s friends.

Technically, this should be one week, but the previous week was a vacation week. However, we did not fully take a break as we continued to recruit and respond to messages to schedule times to get going sooner. Fortunately, we found a decent amount of people. I set up a spreadsheet for email progression of responding surveys to their interest email, then emailing them schedule after they had done the preliminary survey, emailing them consent forms after we have scheduled. As expected as being in the tech field, my partner enjoys automating and keeping the spreadsheet tidy, so she added some conditional formats, scripts, and formulas to make it pretty nice. We later shared that resource with the rest of the team this week.

This week had mostly been preparation for the actual studies. We had pilot studies with each other in our team, then with the graduate mentor, and then on the first day, we had Joey from another team for our first “real” pilot study. Then right after I got a study with him for his study.

I’ve finally come around to setting up Git but it was a local repo on my computer rather than turning the remote Gallaudet one into a git repository because I will need access to the parent folder. I solved that problem later by just putting all my work into a new folder in that remote Gallaudet network location.

This week was a lot of coding and learning on the relevant material. Apparently, I was a ‘full-stack developer’ according to my friend which I did not expect from working this job as a researcher.

Finally, we start wrapping up the literature review and work on our method for the study this week. We looked around with the RTT demo and worked on research scenarios, methods, and questions such as demographics and for the study.

The first day of the week was a day off to honor the dead U.S. soldiers. As soon as that day was over, we started focusing on completing the slides for the literature review and literature review itself as a setup for our research paper’s introduction portion. The week went by quickly and slowly working on just that.

This week we started formulating our research question from our literature review. We also started writing a presentation for our literature review in preparation to present our literature review progress next week. We had difficulties finding good research papers and scholarly articles to back up our topic (WebRTC) since it is so new. We researched stuff that is more relevant to our research question that focuses more on the UI/UX of the captions of WebRTC’s RTT. This sort of overlaps a bit with the caption UI/UX topic but not quite so because ours focuses on the WebRTC component.

As soon as I got back home, I fumbled around to clear out a space to set up my work station since I know that I will start working immediately in the following week. There was no break but I was very excited to jump right back into busy days!