Let's Talk About It -- Week 1

The first official week has been hectic.

I've attended meetings in the CHILLL lab for several weeks, but now we're ready to start our data collection. This means an awful lot of folding, labeling, and sealing to get hundreds of information packets out to potential participants. Throughout the week I have helped compile, file, and style so we can get the most interest in our research project. Week 1 was slow, but thanks to the packets we made, the following weeks will become more exciting.

Beginning next week, an ASU grad student and I will lug around the 50 pound computers to various libraries. After teaching kids to play the computer games, we will assess their working memories. I have yet to get my introduction to the software, but hopefully I'll be able to play the game too!

My first few days in the SLG lab gave me a taste of the tedium behind research. A fellow student and I searched through an excel document of over 15,000 lines, examining the strings of digits denoting specific regions of chromosomes and searching for overlap between the tested regions and regions that other studies have concluded present speech and language impairments. Despite the repetitive nature of this work, finding a match proved extremely exciting, even when we only discovered four or five overlaps in one hundred regions.

However, after only half an hour, we noticed an error in the data. According to the spreadsheet, one of the minimal regions had a higher number than the maximal region. After reexamining all the data, we realized the program from which the data was translated into excel deleted every zero that followed a comma. This discovery rendered our current data invalid, so we spent the rest of the day manually reentering all the data with the correct number of zeros.

My first week afforded me experience with real research. Before my internship, I would never have considered the difficult process behind participant recruitment or even data analysis. In the upcoming weeks, we will begin data collection in the CHILLL lab and continue analyzing previously collected data in the SLG lab. I can't wait to start in earnest!