June 18 - June 22 Recap

June 18

Orientation

Orientation began as many orientations do, with personal introductions. I suppose I can relay what I said, since I didn't introduce myself in the first post. "My name is Ryan Habib, and I am a junior Electrical Engineering major at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and I'm here to do science."

Orientation covered the basic responsibilities we would have, such as how many hours we were expected to work and what we expected to complete. Not much out of the ordinary happened. We had breakfast and listened to presentations. We had lunch and filled out some forms. We had dinner and completed some surveys. It was as excited as it sounds. But the purpose of this blog is not to record what happened at orientation. Partly because it's not important to the ultimate goal of the project and mostly because it was too boring to remember any details.

June 19

Ethics Workshop

Things began to pick up on Tuesday with the ethics workshop. We talked about ethics, and more importantly ethics in research. After taking some notes and listening to some lectures, we got to a discussion about what to do in 3 sample cases. While the first two were straightforward with conclusions easily agreed upon, the third one required some critical thinking.

A researcher had collected an impressive data set and, while her team was focusing on one aspect of it, another group had asked if they could examine her data for another project. However, she had planned on doing this after her current study. 

When asked what we would do, only my teammate Isaac and I had chosen not to send data over to the other group. Everyone else was split between immediately turning over the data or being to talk it out with the other group (which was not one of the choices). In the end, it was difficult to reach a satisfying conclusion since the case was lacking in data needed to reach such a conclusion. An exciting way to end a discussion.

June 20

Meeting

The first day to meet with the people I would actually be working with was rather disappointing when the other undergrad I was to be working with had to leave campus to take a naturalization test. I attended a brief meeting with one of the grad students I'd be working with and gathered some information about what's been going on. I left with some new information about this microgrid project I'd be starting on Friday when my partner returns from appeasing Uncle Sam.

June 21

Studying

Since my partner-in-crime was away from campus, I spent the day studying what exactly a microgrid is. For the interested, I found a nice presentation that summarizes it pretty well here.

June 22

First day

An exciting day for everyone when my compatriot and I journeyed down to the Engineering Lab building for the first real day of activities. After being introduced to the grad student in charge of this microgrid, we spent the majority of the morning downloading the program LabVIEW that we would need to analyze any data. In the afternoon, we continued to download add-ons for the software and read some beginner's information. It may not be the reason I signed up, but it's a necessary step in the process.

"The man who moves mountains begins by carrying away small stones"