Week 5: 7/6/09 - 7/10/09

The dominant theme of this week was looking at the big picture.  I find that I am more task-oriented and often lose sight of the big picture.  I still had to complete many short-term tasks, yet now I have learned that I must also understand the reason for doing each task. This is by far the hardest thing that I have had to do.  MatLab even seems like a fun past-time compared to changing the way that I think about things.  It seems that everything this week was stemming from this lesson.  We first had to make a time series of the new data coming off of the LISST 100-x but now we had to look at why the data looked a certain way and think about it in a large scale view.  The program that came with the LISST is still outputting 8 times too many data points, so we had to go online to find a way to manually process the data using MatLab. It was quite exciting when I made the program work for the first time (I’ve not had the best track record with MatLab). I also had to start thinking about my presentation and even had to give a pre-presentation with 5 minutes notice (Oh geeze).  This process was interesting and yet very frustrating.  I feel like I completely botched up my first presentation.  I had previously made up some PowerPoints to document my progress this summer.  I had to present these since I hadn’t yet made my official midterm presentation. Antonio wanted me to view everything collectively and explain what the data meant for the entire project.  I had unfortunately never thought about the data in this manner and was caught off guard.  I’m glad that I am now aware of thinking in this manner and can see the benefits to thinking of the grand scheme of things.

We then had a presentation that was ridiculously centered on looking at the big picture.  The Grad students came to the seminar and told us about their grad school experience.  I know that I am going to be a senior, but it is really hard to picture myself in grad school.  I do now know a little bit more about the application process and the GRE’s.

Also, I finally went to Saint Cupcake’s this week.  omgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg.  The coconut cupcake kinda made me want to quit my education and devote my life to the art of cupcake making.  But I shall be strong…