2013-11-30
2013-11-26
Today we had a guest lecture from Fernando Perez; I thought this was a fantastic lecture. I wish we could have had this lecture earlier on in the semester, but at the same time, it's been almost more valuable having it towards the end of the semester.
2013-11-27
Yesterday night I also wrote my evaluations for my group and classmates. I think moving into next semester's version of this class, the instructors and students need to hold the instructors more accountable. What is mentioned as will get done often does not get done until the next class period, or not at all. The accountability then trickles down to students, and it feels like there's a small minority of individuals in the class who are driving the progress, while some students might not have contribted at all during the semester. While it's extreme, the semester has been in chunks of a few weeks. The first 5 weeks were spent getting everyone on the same page, and trying to install a virtual machine. The next 4 weeks were around the questionnaire and recent quakes assignments. For about 2 and a half weeks, when we started the earthquake prediction project, our class made decent progress, and hit the "Tuesday" when we all got on the same page again. What almost became a pivot, I don't fully feel like we utilized that day and pushed our progress forward. We had many working sessions, and the groups didn't sync-up as much. But yesterday was also a day when I felt the pressure to push forward harder. Professor Stark and Aaron's goals for us are different, one in a direction of figuring out the scientific problem, the other dropping the problem and focusing efforts on reproducibility and collaboration and our "story". Although I felt anxious at first, I think my group will do our best post-Thanksgiving to tackle the scientific problem while maintaining and improving documentation on our work. It's the home stretch, now.