Finishing Coding, Participating in Studies, and Exploring New Haven

Public writing wall at Arts & Ideas Festival

These couple of weeks have marked a lot of progress in my studies. I've officially finished coding all the past sessions for Katie's two studies! This means that now I just have to code any sessions that I ran in the lab and any sessions from upcoming festivals. While that may sound like a lot of work, it is definitely less than the 40 30-minute long videos I watched, re-watched, and coded. When I'm not coding, I'm running participants in the fairness and compensation study. The more participants we get, the more fun drawings I receive, like this one:

Drawn by a 12-year-old participant

Since this is an unpaid internship, we interns had to get creative with making pocket money, and we quickly discovered that most Yale psychology studies are compensated. So, naturally, we signed up for as many studies as possible. The majority focused on cognition, which made them very different from the ones I had experienced at Clark. While social psychology studies, in my experience, were usually a number of questionnaires, cognitive psychology studies were very hands-on; I looked at images, rated the causality of events, had my eye movement tracked, and so on. To my great disappointment, I was not able to go through an fMRI study due to having a metal wire on my teeth from having had braces. I noticed that when I first started out, I found it very hard to guess the research questions of the studies. But, as I participated in more and more studies, it became easier for me to understand the objectives of each task because I had become familiar with more cognitive psychology concepts.

Also this past week, New Haven's Art and Ideas Festival took place. There were daily concerts, seminars, and plays - unfortunately, I was working during a lot of them so I was only able to catch a few concerts. Even so, it was a great experience and it made me go out and explore New Haven with friends visiting from Worcester:

Juan re-enacting Jurassic World (Peabody Museum)

Stare-down with a prehistoric turtle (Peabody Museum)

Thinnest crust in New Haven (Modern Apizza)

Back in the lab, our lab meetings now follow a different structure - every week, a member of the lab presents their research, elaborating on the research questions and method and encouraging discussion. I find these meetings very useful since they establish a mock-conference setting; researchers discussed the smallest details of their projects with the audience, including a justification of their choices and defending potential methodological weaknesses.

Finally, professional development. In my opinion, the last two seminars have been the most productive. We were assigned "homework" each time; the first time we had to find PhD programs that fit our interests, and the second time we had to write a draft of our personal statement. It was difficult for me to do both of these, since at the time my interests were quite broad and undefined. However, after researching programs, I narrowed down my options and was able to put together a short draft detailing why I want to attend a specific program. For now, I am thinking about programs that combine psychology and education, though I'm not ruling out purely education-based programs.

On Thursday, we completed an entire month of the internship and, to celebrate, the lab went out for dinner. I couldn't understand how I had already finished half of the internship! I absolutely love the work I do in the lab and I look forward to going in for work every morning. Perhaps this is a hint that I will be happy working in research in the future :)