My Purdue Experience - Dimitrios

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 I am now officially done with the internship and I can look back at the whole experience with a different set of pairs, as the hard times are over. I will start by saying some things that I am proud of and that I and the rest of the team have achieved over the course. When I first started working with Deepak,   he asked me to help him perform an ultrasound quality assessment, a task I had never even remotely seen or heard again in my life. I am proud of the fact that I could adapt to this highly demanding environment and I could commit myself to a project I did not choose. I am proud that I could keep up and read the literature, which is partly due to the experience GSTR 210 and 310 had equipped me with. Without these two, I would not be able to distinguish which sources are important and prestigious. At the same time, in GSTR 310 I learned how to use Zotero, which was a decisive tool for the whole internship experience. I am also proud of the coding performance I showed, b...

 This is my final entry post :(  I wanted to start this one by saying how much I appreciate the TAs. Because they genuinely try to give you feedback or help you in the comments, this makes it so much different than just doing a task and forgetting about it. Having someone to read what you went through is fantastic. I could try and explain what I did today to my mom, but the thing is that most of my tasks are so technical, and she would never understand them. She would still be very happy about me but learning to express and explain your work, in other words, sell your work to an audience that can understand you make all the difference.  Today I finally got done sorting the code, and I collected everything in the repository, with a code fully functional and logically sorted. Deepak said that he would take over the draft corrections of the paper and that I could rest assured that he would submit everything on Sunday. The only comment we have gotten so far about the research...

 I woke up sick today, so I asked Deepak to take the day off from work and have a conversation about the experience and what I should take away from it or what I should try to improve. We had a very long conversation, but I will try to summarize some good and bad experiences we talked about. During my internship here, so many smart people were introduced to me. I made good friends with other interns while I was doing my internship. Most of the time, I felt stupid, but being in a room with people who are better than you is a fantastic experience. I acquired cultural sensitivity as people practiced and held to a wide variety of beliefs. It was both tough and interesting. As a student, I was always carefree about my responsibilities and assignments, just like any other student, but when you enter a job environment, things move quickly. One assignment after another is assigned to you, and clearly, you cannot put them off. You are gradually schooled to function and advance in that setti...

 Today I worked on standardizing and fixing my code. Inside the paper we are submitting, we have included a link where everyone interested can find our code, organized and fully functional in all operating systems. Now, these two words sound easy, but I left the office today with a headache, as it is tough for me to locate the correct files and code to add them to the repository. The reason I am struggling so much is that when I was writing it, I left minimal comments, and I have so many files with the same name but with a number in the end, like cluster.py and cluster1.py. At the time, when I was experimenting with the code, it made sense, and I thought I would not forget it in 3 weeks when I would write the paper. Comments and good names are seriously the best things a programmer can do to their selves, which is something I learned in both 224 and 236, but I never used it in any of the two courses. Back then, I was not penalized, but now I am since it's taking so much more time t...

 My framework figure was accepted!!! Now, I have already submitted the first complete draft to Deepak and the professor as of today. The Conference deadline for the paper submission is the 30th, and my internship ends on the 29th, which is perfect timing. Since I have submitted the whole paper draft, I can now say that I am proud of the writing in that paper; although counting all the smaller subdrafts, I probably have written more than 25 pages of information. After Deepak's comments, I cut these pages to 8 with a very heavy heart. I always had a problem with feedback because I always think that my work is amazing and there is no reason to delete or rephrase a significant part of it. This is a behavior I noticed I had after my GSTR 310 professor pointed out that my second draft was my first draft but with a different name. Since then, I have tried to accept feedback more open-hearted. I think this time was a bit different since when I am writing an academic paper in Berea, I usual...