Week 2: Beginning

Last week the team met with our advisor in two separate meetings. In the first meeting, Keenah, Andriana, and I sat down with Dr. Bloom and outlined what we would be doing for the next couple of weeks. He first explained to us that we would be using Trello to keep track of where everyone is and the work in progress. Trello is an easy way to keep track of the work backlog, work in progress and work were done, as well as what work each person has contributed to a specific body of work. The current work in progress is to create the project website, read work related to the proposal, and identify IoT Block Programming constructs.

In the second meeting, the team met with Dr. Bloom and other research groups that he is advising. This meeting was more of a "How to do Research" instructional meeting. The main thing that I took away from the meeting was learning how to manage your time more effectively and mapping out your plan for every time you sit down to work on your research. He emphasized that we should always work in a timely manner so that work never becomes 'critical', as in you don't have to rush through work to get things submitted.

So this week, I outlined the time I would spend on research every day in the week. From Monday to Thursday I blocked out 2:30 - 3 hours to read the literature related to the proposal and work through the in progress on our Trello. I would spend 2 hours on Saturday finishing my blog post for that week and wrapping up any more necessary work.

The challenge here for me is managing my time and actually sitting down to do research. This week I only spent 4 hours total on the research. I have been extremely sick and I couldn't do much of anything. In the meeting with Dr. Bloom, he did mention that we need to take time to take care of ourselves and I guess I neglected that trying to do research and my assignments and going to work.

Also during my work time, I continuously got distracted so I now know not to work in my room and to go to a more crowded area because that is where I work best. I also know why it takes me so long to read one article and that is because I read, take notes, then read it over, and write down more notes based on what I remembered. That can be time-consuming but I believe it is a good way to commit things to memory and make sure I understood what I read.

I noticed that my note taking has gotten better. I used to have notes that didn't really connect with each other and had a lot of information that wasn't too important. Now my notes are more concise and have more meaningful analysis. I can now see where everything is connecting and I will document that in my next blog.

My goal for next week is to spend more time on my literature review; I want to at least spend 8 hours on my research and follow my schedule even more.