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!

On the first day, we had a brief orientation hosted by Dr. Raja Kushalngar and his team members that explained briefly the program, introduced staff, and touched on what we had to do. All teams also met with their mentors respectively. My team (Michelle and I) met with Norman Williams. Right after, we started doing our CITI training for the certificate to allow us to research with human subjects. The readings were quite long. The mentors said that one could do the certificate training within two hours but that’s not the case if one was to closely read and study for the quizzes to get the certificate. I skimmed around and got it done before the day got dark. I also connected my GitHub with Gallaudet’s and set up my Gallaudet email as well.

Day two, we spent the whole day doing a literature review. One could say we’ve seen everything. So we felt quite ahead but also weren’t too sure if that’s what we were supposed to be doing. Thankfully, we have a daily check-in with another mentor: Jacob Skatja. She elaborated more on what to look for during a literature review and assured us that we were on the right track.

Day three, we started to draft a literature review paper and write summaries for papers to absorb the material better and prepare for the presentation that we will have on the third week. I also submitted the information needed for tax and payroll.

Day four, we met with mentor Norman Williams again who helped to clarify and address some of our concerns regarding our topic and literature review. He showed us two other demos on WebRTC that he did not show on orientation. With the new information, we changed path a bit on our literature review and focused on looking for more practical information that can help tackle. On the same day, we also met with everyone in the program for a weekly check-in. Dr. Raja Kushalngar elaborated more on the program’s schedule and expectations. He also touched on how to write a research paper, what research is to the researchers, why is it good, what is good research, what is a bad one, and such. We also went over some things such as weekly reports and the GitHub website. To wrap it up, everyone shared their professional and personal goals. Everyone seems to be excited to gain more experience in general, and most of us wanted to get more moving around or learn ASL as personal goals.

Day five, it is the end of the week! For today, we did some more research and we met with Mary Clark who asked us about our identities and background and stuff. She wants to collect information to help to improve the REU AICT program. To wrap this week up, I set up the GitHub website and wrote my first weekly report on the blog (precisely this one!).

To conclude, this week was my first week of a full-time job I had and I’ve already learned so many things. I’ve learned relevant information for research with CITI certificate training, literature review, forms for tax and payroll, setting up a GitHub site, and more!