Week 3

This week has been shorter because the 4th of July was a holiday!  However, I have still been busy, as usual! 

Helen and I have been working a lot on the PEARS school reports.  As part of it, I have been learning SPSS, and I took my first dive into learning the syntax to generate the data for some of the charts.  We then had a group meeting where I got to present the charts and graphs I have been working on and get feedback about what was useful and what should be done differently.  This will be an on-going project that will probably pick up a lot next week once we have nailed down what we are doing and I get to create them for the other three schools besides the one we are using to prototype with.  Helen also gave me two books on SPSS, so I have massive amounts to learn on that front!

Along with the school reports, I got back into another project I had started earlier in the year, which was looking at the open-ended question at the very end of PEARS.  I sorted the responses for each school into the basic categories of "Feedback to the school," "More information about work," and "Pathways (work and school)."  Thus, each school will not just receive a list of the responses, but have a general framework with which to read them.  I will continue to work with the open-ended responses to draw out the useful bits.

I am excited to report that we gained access to the online version of Delta Design, and Sam, Mark, and I will be trying it out tomorrow morning.  I'm looking forward to seeing what becomes of this project!

I had a meeting with Philipp to talk about the work he did on the PEARS entrepreneurship stuff, so I will also be diving into that dataset next week.  (Tuesday I was in meetings for 4.5 hours, and it was awesome.  Have I mentioned how much I love this research team!?!?)

And I of course added more to my ePortfolio - you can now watch videos of me doing gymnastics and wushu! 

Fun things: Last Saturday, I got to go hummingbird catching!  One of my friends is doing biology research with hummingbirds, so I got to go with them to help.  So I have now held a humingbird!!  We catch them in these large net contraptions with feeders inside - when the bird approaches the opening, we run at them and scare them into the net.  Once they are caught, we take them out, tag them, give them a drink of nectar, and release them.  It was a cool experience!  I also watched 4 days of Oympic gymnastics trials that were shown on TV (my friend recorded them, so we watched them after it happened - it was really sad because the trials were held here in San Jose, but I'm a poor starving college student and I couldn't afford to go.  Only upside is that we have some awesome gymnasts here at Stanford, including one who was competing in the trials!  I also spent the 4th of July in San Fransisco, which was fun!