Not going to lie, I feel like a month went by this past week! Definitely not yet accustomed to the lifestyle of chasing a singular, focused semi long-term pursuit. But, it’s been rewarding, and everyone I’ve worked with so far have been awesome. I’m on the telecom captions team. Isabelle, my fellow undergrad partner, comes from a linguistics background; she’s fascinated by the nuances of speech production, one of the focuses of our project! We have a faculty mentor, Linda, who’s experienced in experimental design and very knowledgeable in the field of captioning services for individuals with hearing loss. Through our meetings, she guides Isabelle and me to explore different avenues of interest; I really appreciate the direction Linda provides. It’s been a pleasure meeting with Katja, our graduate student mentor, each day to debrief. Dr. Christian, Co-PI and super fast responder on discord, helped me through a couple questions I had this week. Finally, Dr. Raja, PI, works hard to coordinate this whole program. Friday, I was receiving an error trying to build this webpage, in fact haha, and Dr. Raja jumped in to attempt to resolve the issue, very sweet of him.

Attended my first large-group program meeting on Thursday where Dr. Raja presented on what good research is with a focus on the abstract. ASL was the primary means of communication used at the meeting with interpreters available. As a hearing individual with a little bit of ASL background, I was trying very hard to understand what everyone was signing, without relying too much on the interpreters. Got more than I expected but pretty sure my brain depleted my entire glucose storage in that one hour :’) Definitely a good experience, and I’m looking forward to improving my receptive ASL skills throughout the summer with these meetings in addition to learning about my peers’ work and about research and graduate school.

I spent a good portion of this week reading up on FCC regulations around IP CTS, the government funded captioning telephone service for Hard-of-Hearing individuals, including both consumer organization and service provider response. In the past, it has never occurred to me that it is important to understand the legal and consumer sides when conducting research that impacts the public sector.

Like I sort of mentioned earlier, I haven’t done immersive research like this before. I noticed that doing a literature review with the intent of simply answering a question that’s already provided to you (what I’ve traditionally done for coursework) is very different from doing a literature review with the intent of gaining background and inspiration to produce your own research. For one thing, the scope of the lit review for producing your own research is much broader because you never know if a paper from a different field or one that seems only tangentially related to your own topic may substantially aid your thinking for your project. Furthermore, you kind of don’t exactly know what you’re looking for. So, you have to be comfortable sitting with some uncertainty, which I am not but perhaps will resolve itself as I read more and gain a clearer idea of what’s out there and what’s feasible for us to contribute to the literature.

Overall, it’s been a productive week 1 and I look forward to week 2!