Week 9

Welcome to week 9! This is the last full week of the program... time went by too fast! On Monday, we created our poster to present at the undergraduate research symposium. The symposium was on Friday, but we had to submit our posters on Tuesday so it could get printed. So, we worked all day Monday to get the poster done. On Tuesday, we did some minor edits and revisions based on Arvind's suggestions and then submitted it to print. Later that night after work, some of the group met up for a game of volleyball on the courts outside our apartments. This was our last volleyball game for the summer, so it was a bittersweet moment. We played three rounds and half until it was too dark outside to see where the ball was being hit. Then we called it a night and headed back to our dorms. The next day, we went out for lunch to a Mexican restaurant with Hugo, our postdoc mentor. After we came back from our lunch break, we headed to our weekly seminar. This seminar was on graduate student presentations. All the graduate students working in our REU gave a short presentation about the research they are working on and their grad school experience. It was interesting learning about their projects and research areas! One presentation on wildfires especially caught my eye because it was similar to our project on inverse problems and state estimation. After the presentations were over, we headed back to work. We spent most of the afternoon continuing to write our paper. Arvind made the decision to publish our work in the SIAM undergrad journal, so we are hoping to finish a first draft before we leave so we can receive some feedback in person. This REU has a fall semester component where we continue working on our project, so although we will all leave next week, we will continue to work on our projects. For our group, that means writing the paper. We have mostly been writing the paper together, taking different sections and reading each other's work, so if we can manage to finish a draft by next week, then I think it would be easier to continue working on it remotely since we would have a rough draft mostly done.

Wednesday night, we headed out for our last night of trivia (lots of "last" things happening this week). If you have been reading all of my blogs, then you know that we have been going out to trivia every Wednesday! Each time we head to a different place, and this time we went to The Station at Pearson Street. We got a table outside and ordered some food before the trivia started. I was still full from my lunch earlier, so I ordered only a dessert (it was a brownie sundae pictured below!). Our team didn't do too bad- we tied for 5th place! We had a good time and I will definitely miss our weekly trivia nights with the group.

On Thursday, we continued working on our paper and editing some parts. Friday was the poster session, so we all came in dressed up in business casual clothes for our presentations. The symposium was located on the other side of campus that I haven't even explored yet - NC state campus is huge! Two groups were scheduled to present in the morning at 9 and 11 am, one at 1 pm, and the rest at 3 pm. Our session was at 3 pm, so we had time before our talk. That morning, however, we had one-on-one meetings with Arvind, so we couldn't visit the other groups' presentations in the morning. After our meeting, we headed out to lunch with Arvind and Hugo. We went to Neomonde, which was a Mediterranean place, and the food was delicious! After that, we headed to the symposium to get ready. We walked around to look at some of the other work (the symposium was university-wide so there was research from all different kinds of STEM fields), and then when it was time, we set up our poster.

We got a few people come up to our poster and ask questions, and the 50 minutes we were given flew by. After our session was over, we all went back home. At night, some of us met up again in the lounge to watch "The Hangover". On Saturday, we had a couple of things planned. First, we visited UNC. Vasishta, my groupmate, goes to UNC so he offered to give us a tour. Since it was the weekend, we couldn't go inside all the buildings, but the campus looked really nice. We also went to the UNC bookstore, which had three levels! We also went to a nearby cafe, and after a quick coffee break, we went for all-you-can-eat sushi at a place called Mr. Tokyo. I have never had sushi before, so I was excited to try it for the first time. I ordered a cucumber roll, Boston roll (which had shrimp, cucumber, and lettuce), Rainbow roll (this one had raw fish!), and one other one. I ended up liking everything! I also tried some of the rolls that my friends ordered and once we were stuffed, we helped each other finish.

After we all finished eating, we headed back to our dorms to rest. Then we met up again at night to celebrate two birthdays! We all hung out together for the first part of the night, and then we wished them a happy birthday as they left to go out with a few of our other friends. The rest of us stayed in and yapped for a while and then we decided to watch "The Hangover 2". Halfway through, we got tired and were ready to go to bed, so we didn't finish watching the movie and all headed to sleep. On Sunday, Maya and I took the bus to Hunt Library. It was a place I wanted to visit before I left NC State because it's a very modern and prominent research library. It has a robot called bookBot that stores and retrieves books, which is the first thing you can see when you walk in. The design of the library was very modern and bright and there were many cool, innovative study spaces. After we finished touring the library, we took the bus to Alpaca Chicken, a Peruvian restaurant we both wanted to check out. They served rotisserie chicken as well as some traditional Peruvian dishes. The food was really good, but sadly, we can't go back next week because this was our last week here. We headed to a nearby bakery for a sweet treat and then took the bus back to our dorm. It was a nice, relaxing last Sunday spent in Raleigh!

Thanks for reading!

Gaby