Hello all!
This week, we are discussing how our first impression of the
REU matches/clashes with our previous expectation. Here are my thoughts…
Living in Iowa, only 2.5 hours away from Menomonie, I admit I wasn’t very
surprised to see the city and surrounding scenery. I mean, if you only cut the
population down by about 95%, replaced the buildings with cornfields, the
forests with cornfields, Lake Menomin with cornfields, and got rid of any
remaining scenery, you’d basically have my hometown. Perhaps that’s a bit of an
exaggeration (I’m sure we have a bean or hay field somewhere in Iowa as well)…
On a more serious note, I am very happy to be studying in such a beautiful
region. Despite being raised in the Midwest, I feel Wisconsin offers an
entirely unique scenic experience.
Regarding the workload for this REU, I expected to be in
over my head right away, despite previous email conversations that attempted to
reassure me otherwise. I pictured arriving on the first day to hear other
students discussing their hours of preliminary research they had prepared (and everyone had glasses and carried around a notepad). I
calmed down after meeting everybody and realizing we were all normal undergraduate students,
feeling the same mixture of excitement and uncertainty for what the future
held.
It felt good when we got past the first day or two of
program technicalities and finally got to work. My partner and I are doing
ethnographic work, so this week felt a bit slow as we went around practicing
our interviewing skills on the unsuspecting people of Menomonie (mooahaha). I’m
sure it will speed up as we start scheduling real interviews. I still can’t
clearly see the end product of my work this summer, but I am sure it will
unfold itself as I go. (Insert cliché about the importance of the journey, not
the destination).
That’s all for now. Until next week!
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