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.

Our first interviews were with two friends on a Saturday as they both have work during the weekdays. Those went pretty well which left us hopeful for the remaining interviews. We also got more than 20 people who were interested, so we thought we were all set. Little did we know, quite a bit of them was there for the money and did not qualify for our studies and pretty much wasted our time. However, we kept ourselves busy while they didn’t show up and such so it wasn’t too bad. Nonetheless, they did occupy time slots that legitimate participants may not be able to use.

Some did show up but they did not have a camera, computer, or even knew ASL which were our requirements. Initially, we went through with one guy who was just like that using texting but we realized later that he probably only quickly learned to fingerspell and was hearing so we have to get rid of his data.

Most of the people that did show up were my friends or my partners’. I’m glad that my friends did show up because back then I wouldn’t have been able to gather that many people in the past who I could say was my friend. So at some point in my life, I suddenly went from having little friends to many, especially people that know ASL so that’s pretty cool.

At the end of the week, they had a group meeting again. And as expected, they ask for progress updates. With this prediction, I made a presentation again, but it is brief and concise. During the meeting, I even added two slides on the spot to answer questions that Dr. Raja has asked other groups. However, there are still questions as one group asked us how we recruited people as we have so many ‘interested’, although many of them are probably not legitimate participants. Even so, we did have a lot of legitimate studies done and planned compared to other groups so I think we are on good progress.