The research experience I partook in was a summer research program with the Maryland Space Grant Consortium. This program was 10 weeks long and the school I was assigned to was the University of Maryland College Park. The research I did was created an augmented reality user interface for use by satellite servicing tele-robotic operators. The program started in June and ended in August to make the span of those 10 weeks.

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This experience falls under one of the pre-approved options, because it was a summer-long internship program. I was there from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, so the total number of hours spent was about 400 hours. This research experience involved a lot of independent work and at the end of it I was required to give a 10 minute presentation about the work I did at the Summer Research Symposium. The experience was completed in the summer of 2019.

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I learned to believe in myself during this experience and never to underestimate how much I truly know. I was not very confident in my knowledge with coding because I had not taken many classes involving it, but once I started working on my project I felt myself making progress and this was extremely rewarding. I was able to see what goes into programs that engineers doing large scale projects would use such as NASA. This only emphasized further my passion for the field I am studying in because I was able to understand how truly versatile mechanical engineering is. I was working on a project that was very coding based, but other people in the lab were working on projects that required a lot of machining. I found it extremely interesting.

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This experience taught me a lot about coding in general, I definitely will take the coding practice into account when interviewing for jobs because I think recruiters will see it as an asset. I hope to work for NASA one day maybe so it’s possible this project has brought me a step closer because it related to space robotics. By presenting my research I feel like that gave me a lot of experience with public speaking so I will definitely use this for if I need to present anything in my work.    

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One of the things that makes this experience close to my own is the coding aspect of it. I had to essentially create a program from scratch and the skills I learned on how to make an intuitive user interface can very easily be applied to the way I will advance personalized learning. Augmented reality is an advantageous tool that helps with visualization and immersion into classroom concepts, modeling, and much more. I believe that although the research wasn’t directly related to education, this experience is applicable to my challenge.

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This research experience definitely contributed to the objective or persistence. I cannot count the plethora of errors  that I had to make with my code on the way to creating a user interface that actually worked. Had I not been surrounded by an immensely supportive group of individuals I would not have been able to complete the quality of work I was able to under the pressure of an approaching deadline. It was very hard not to lose hope on a feature I was trying to work on when I would try to fix the errors, but trying over again and learning from the past mistakes helped me understand the project in a much deeper way.

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I was able to express ideas in an organized, clear, concise, and accurate manner. Because of the presentational aspect of this research opportunity, I was forced to condense a summer’s worth of learning into a slideshow that lasted 10 minutes. This taught me how to express my ideas concisely and accurately because I chose each slide carefully as well as practiced the presentation multiple times before giving it.

 

I also had the opportunity to write clearly and effectively. Every week we were require to turn in a report of our goals as well as our progress for our projects, and this forced me to write out my findings and completed tasks clearly and effectively.

 

I had to effectively connect multiple ideas and approaches. I was assigned a mentor for this project and when I was stuck or was struggling to look at something from a different perspective, I would call upon him to help. He helped be see how to do one thing in multiple ways and this was very helpful.

 

I formulated questions and hypotheses within the discipline. Because this project was a work in progress that required a lot of trial and error, I was force to formulate questions about how parts of the interface worked, or how they felt to use by a real person. Once I understood these answers better, I would go back and fix these flaws in the program and this process continued iteratively throughout the summer.

 

I was able to understand better how practitioners think within the discipline and view the world around them. The head of the lab was working on other things with about 7 other people in the lab. We would have meetings every week where we went around the room essentially talking about and presenting our research so far. He has done many project with NASA and Lockheed Martin so I got to understand  his way of thinking as well as the way the other students at the University of Maryland thought as well.

 

I predicted, recognized, and weighed the risks and benefits of the project for other. This project has a very limited time frame, and so setting goals for what I wanted to do within that time frame was very important. As I got to understand the struggles of coding better, I knew that something that sounded simple could sometimes take days to complete. Weighing the time and predicting when I would be able to accomplish different tasks was essential for this project.

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Additionally, I had to use and understand professional and discipline-specific language. Starting out I have to admit that I was intimidated by the language used in the lab because half of the projects I was not familiar with. As time went on, I understood more of the language and acronyms used and I felt more comfortable with using it myself.

 

Finally, I had to use time well to ensure my work was accomplished and met all the deadlines. The deadline for the presentation at the summer research symposium definitely pushed me to complete my project at a steady pace. I constantly felt like if I didn’t do enough work I would never reach my end result. The weekly check ins with my lab kept me on track and taught me how to manage my time and goals.

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