Week 3: A Reflection

In the two and a half weeks since the beginning of the Third Trimester, I have encountered various problems that have slowed down my research process. For example, my outside advisor is a UCSC Astronomy professor, and he is very busy with outside research and teaching classes. For now, I will continue to try to get into contact with Raja and reach out to some other professors and graduate students at UCSC.

Beginning the senior project has really changed my perspective on independent research, and I did not anticipate this amount of independence. I was used to always having directions or guidelines to follow and that led to expected results, so sometimes I would feel lost and confused as to how to approach my project. I remember during my COSMOS summer program, the professors all spoke about how prevalent mental health problems and depression were within the graduate student community.

My next step will be to learn how to download and learn how to use MATLAB.