So begins Fall 2015! As a post-baccalaureate student I’m now only taking one official class, Memory and Cognition, in order to focus on my major projects at Wings & Things and on getting ready for graduate school applications. I’m doing some independent study on deafness and American Sign Language linguistics as well as numerical and visual cognition.

My summer in the Cognitive Development Lab was primarily spent figuring out the ins and outs of SPSS. Interpreting and organizing absolutely huge data sets, coding qualitative variables, imputing missing data… It was really an interesting (though occasionally tedious) learning experience! I even learned a little bit of Python to try to speed things up a little in doing repetitive processes multiple times, though that didn’t help much while I was running mediation and moderation analyses. It paid off though! My labmate and I presented some of our preliminary findings at the UWF College of Science, Engineering, and Health Summer Scholars Symposium. Though it was only a pilot study that needs much more work, we were really proud of how far we’ve come in a single summer! We’re going to be keeping up the hard work this fall; SEPA 2016 here we come!

As the new semester starts, I’m flying out to interview for a PhD fellowship at a really promising program in less than 36 hours; I’m extremely nervous but also very confident. This opportunity is so much more than I expected at this stage of my academic career- in fact, it’s more than I EVER expected. Even if it doesn’t go well, I have something that I can be proud of and build on for the next opportunity that comes my way. I was selected as a finalist for a PhD fellowship after all, and I can only get better from here.