Over the past week, we've made significant progress in defining my goals and expectations for the project as well as determining potential pitfalls and challenges. This has made me more aware of my ability to create a realistic, creative vision for a project without predetermined guidelines.
After meeting with Professor Skon the first time, I started to feel a little overwhelmed with the project. The lack of structure seemed like a burden to me. As the week progressed, however, I started to come up with some ideas for analyses and ways in which the data could be used to highlight some of the benefits of solar panels. Additionally, I came up with the idea to model the efficiency of the solar panels, which led to a discussion in my second meeting with Professor Skon about how such a model could help to characterize the solar panels' operations. After this brainstorming, the open-endedness of the project felt less like a burden and more like an opportunity. This is because I switched from a mindset focused on fear of failure to one of potential for success.
Once it was time to present what we had in store for the project, I felt like I had a much more comprehensive idea of what the project was going to look like. I was happy with my presenting skills and how well I kept larger goals for the project in mind while discussing the individual components. Specifically, I used transitions to and from my partners' sections to motivate my section of the project and my partner's section of the project.
Finally, I realized during my research this week how my physics background would help me and my partners to understand some of the finer points of the project.
At this point, I'm finally starting to flesh out a few subprojects which will piece together to be the data analysis portion of the solar project. The two major components are the efficiency modeling and providing long-term analyses for large stretches of data. This has been a nice transition from the uncertainty I felt last week, although I still have some apprehensions about time-scales for each of the subprojects. I do not want to end up with a half-finished project, so I think in the coming weeks I should sketch out rough time scales for each of the project components. This caution mostly pertains to the efficiency modeling, which involved a large amount of research on solar cells. Thankfully, in preparation for this, I attended a physics senior exercise talk on solar cells in which I gained much insight into some of the specifics of solar cell efficiency.
Another challenge I came across over the week was the nature of my update. The majority of my work that week was rather logistical (specifically creating Makefiles and learning about the basics of C++ which, while valuable, can often be a drag to hear lectured. To remedy this, I decided to focus less on the specifics of the coding and more on the good software development habits I learned along the way, and how I could use tools with which I already had experience to supplement my learning. For example, as I was learning about how to properly organize my source code files and executables, I took advantage of my experience with GitHub to make those files accessible remotely while keeping track of versions and commits. I believe this was a welcome alteration based on the reaction of my peers.
I'm making progress on my project, but not at the rate I was hoping for. My honors deadlines and comps deadlines aligned to create the perfect storm over the past few weeks and I can't help but feel like I could improve and expand on what I'm doing. The good news is that after the deadlines, I'll be able to devote a much larger portion of my time to the project, which I'm very excited for.
I think my presentation went pretty well. In the past, I felt I didn't leave enough time for questions, which I corrected by including fewer slides. I was happy with how much discussion was generated after leaving more time for inquiry. I think answering the questions helped me understand my project more while giving me some ideas for how to improve my work. In the future, I'll continue to make my presentations more discussion oriented and only summarize the main points of the work from the previous week.
I learned a lot preparing for and during my last update presentation. I was finally able to spend some time on my project this past week which made the presenting process seem much more rewarding. I think I communicated well where my project is and where it's going, but I did feel like I was unable to answer some of the questions I got sufficiently, namely Tudor's question. Although it was just a clarifying question, I was confused about what part of the project he was asking about. Other than that, I think as usual the time alotted for discussion was valuable and improved my project. I think that I could work on making my recap a little shorter since I felt like at this point in the year most people are familiar enough with all the projects for me to assume that knowledge.