November 15, 2021

Oh Fuck I Almost Forgot

As the title suggests, I nearly forgot to write my newsletter (blog post? whatever) today. Last week was the first fall reading week ¹. In undergrad, I’d usually be relieved and take a few days off as as breather. I find myself unable to take an extended break from work (without feeling guilt) in grad school, since I feel like I effectively already spend my days doing nothing. As a result, this week was spent still going into the lab and doing what small amount of work I can.

I ran a small pilot study of my survey with one lab member last week. As suspected, I would have a lot of work to do to iron out some of the kinks. It turns out that having a few sentences that are elaborating on what exactly I’m asking in the survey would be useful. I’ll probably publish a link to the survey here once I get it approved with ethics.

The majority of my time last week was spent making each survey question as obvious as possible (without giving away anything or introducing bias). It turns out – that’s actually quite difficult. I eventually ended up writing small code snippets that each described a scenario associated with a software development question. This upcoming week, I’ll run an updated version of my pilot study. I’m hoping to recruit some of my lab members. If you’re reading this, there’s no escape.

I was also asked to cat sit this weekend by some old coworkers of mine. Here’s a pic!

I still can’t believe how great it is having a cat around. Of course, taking care of a cat for a weekend is completely different from actually owning one, but it’s still something I’d like to experience sometime.

That’s it for this week, I hope I get to submit my ethics application by Friday.