Week 9

I can't believe it's the end of week 9 already :(

In happy news, though, THE DAY MIGHT HVE FINALLY COME!!  What day?  The day I've been saying was close all summer (oh how wrong I was, haha).  The day when I finished the charts for all 4 schools and sent them to Helen to be incorporated with the rest of the slides for the school reports!!!  The charts are DONE!  The school reports are almost done, we will be having one more group meeting about them next week (mostly to talk about big-picture things, like the other materials and the dissemination plan, rather than the nitpicky things like the axes labels in my charts).  I once again spent a good chunk of this week working on the charts, but for the last time yay! My next plan is to compile them all into one powerpoint, print them out, and then start comparing the schools, which I think will be fascinating!

I also had a chance to work on the pre-PEACHES dataset, which was fun.  Sam taught me a nifty SPSS command that allows me to better split and organize the data I'm comaring.  I started by re-creating the resuts Mark Schar got by comparing people with high interest in entrepreneurship with those who were not interested, which was a good check for me to make sure I was interpreting things correctly. I then started looking for other things.  One variable I was interested in was the grit measure.  If you compare everyone who was highly interested in entrepreneurship with those not from both groups, there is not a significant difference.  However, if you compare high/low entrepreneurship within each group (E14 and Mechanical Turk), there is a significant difference on the Persistence of Effort variable (which is actually 4 questions rolled into one) for the Mechanical Turk people, but not the Stanford students (meaning that high entrepreneurship people are more persistent in the general population, but not for Stanford students).  I thought this was interesting because I know I have a high grit score (I am persistent, I just don't apply my persistence to anything entrepreneurial, like many other people I know), so I did not think this would be a good measure for entrepreneurship interest.  It was really interesting to find that there actually is a difference in the general population, and made me curious about whether or not the difference was Stanford-specific, or student-specific.  I also started some of the gender analysis, and will continue to look for interesting things there. 

I worked on my SURI poster, drafting it up so people could look at it and give me feedback, which I incorporated. It was kind of fun to concisely explain what I have been doing all summer and pick bits of information or graphs that say something interesting.  It was kind of sad, though, realizing how close the end of the summer is. 

And finally, I worked more on my Learning Outcomes page, and had an interesting discussion at our lab meeting about it.  I find it fascinating that I am learning so many of my ABET mechanical engineering outcomes from sources other than my engineering classes.  For example, there are things like "knowledge of contemporary issues" which I have gone out of my way to learn about, by taking history classes like Global Human Geography, where we learned about Asia and Africa and why things are the way they are right now from a historical perspective.  But since that is not a required class, it makes me wonder how the engineering department thinks they are teaching that to me.  It also really showed me the impact some things have on my life.  My friends have massively contributed to my knowledge of contemporary issues.  I have many international friends, and friends who care about all kinds of different issues.  They have all educated me in some way about contemporary issues that I otherwise would never have learned about.  But that is also not something that I ever get the chance to explain.  Doing this exercise actually really made me appreciate the liberal education that Stanford stresses - it's one of the reasons I decided to come here.  If I had not, I would have been at a small, technical school, where I don't think I would have learned some of these broader things. 

In the land of fun things, Santa Cruz last weekend was a blast, we splashed in the water, buried people in the sand, made human pyramids, played beach volleyball, relaxed, and enjoyed having most of the friend group in one place at the same time.  I also learned how to play tennis, which was entertaining, since I have never played before.  I managed to hit the ball over the net a good chunk of the time!  (and then also swing and epically miss the ball a lot, haha).  And today is my roommate's birthday, so we are celebrating that!  Today is also my last day of wushu practice for the summer, which is sad (I now have 1.5 months to get completely out of shape, haha).