S-STEM Scholar Chris Gonzalez's Blog

We made it, everyone! Week 14! The end of the semester, and the end of my first chapter with the S-STEM/TRAIN program (with more to come if all goes well). The entirety of this week was spent prepping a presentation of the research project. I like to think I did a decent job on it - I'm typically a PowerPoint perfectionist and I will  spend multiple hours trying to come up with a perfect font/layout/color/line animation combo - but I told myself to hold off on all of that and stick to something simple, which ultimately benefitted the presentation itself. No flashy graphics, just simple and clean data (which is something I probably should've told myself before I picked a gaudy late 90s Web 1.0 aesthetic for this blog). It still took me an embarrassingly long time to settle on this presentation design. It did its job, though! The presentation itself went off without a hitch! Although, I'll admit that I did occasionally suffer from that lifelong problem of mine where I tend ...

Week 13 now! It's been great posting here this semester. I love having a little place to write down my thoughts, even if it is  homework. I took a break last week, but I'm back before we wrap up here for this semester. Work was considerably slowing down on my project, and my rough draft feedback was initially very discouraging - or at least that's how I perceived it when I read it at 2 in the morning. I thought there was no way out and I'd have to scrap all of my research and scramble last-minute to come up with something. I was convinced  the final paper wasn't due until right before school ends for the holidays, so you can imagine my surprise when I checked Canvas this morning and saw that the paper was due by 11:59 PM tonight . Naturally, I panicked. But then I re-read my rough draft feedback, and all I needed to do was actually cite my resources and include in-text citations; the project itself was fine! I ended up spending all day finishing up that paper (which...