Reflection
Going into my project, I was really excited. One of my favorite professors had accepted me as his mentee. I had looked over the information that he wanted me to start with do conduct my research and I was excited to get it started. Everything seemed to be going well, but that is when the rough patches hit. The early stages of my research was chalk full of coding issues. My research had to be conducted in Mathematica, a program offered for free on campus. Mathematica is the only program provided by the school with the computational power to compute the numbers needed for my research, but it was also a program that I had no experience with. Thus, I had to start from scratch and teach myself everything as I proceeded in my research. Essentially, I learned what I needed to learn in order to do what I thought I needed to do. This caused a lot of problems, whether it be code not working, calculations coming out wrong, or frustration due to not know how to code something, over the first two months of my research.
Once I got the hang of the programming aspect, the it made a lot of the research a lot easier than I expected. Using the code, I was able to calculate all the values I needed and print it out in such a way that copying it over into a data table to be analyzed and explained by myself a fast and easy process. Although I say fast, each set of data would usually take me about 20 to 30 minutes to produce on the program at which point I would spend 10 to 15 minutes copying it over into the proper data table, but this was light years beyond what most others could do.
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As my research progressed smoothly, I confidently zoomed through it during late January and February, but once March came a drowning realization occurred. Although I had been collecting data at a faster rate than before and became ambitious and decided to expand my research, I never realized how dependent of university's programs I was. At the beginning of March I had realized that due to spring break, I had lost almost two weeks worth of research time on campus. With the Festival of Excellence right around the corner and I having not even started preparing for it yet. With my absence during spring break I was not able to spend as much time on research as I wanted to during March. This led me to having to putting the breaks on some parts of my research that I wanted to venture into in the future but did not have time for.
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The finale of my research was presenting it at FoE. My presentation there would be an accumulation of all the work I have done and all the things I have discovered during my research. Going in, I was nervous that I would forget an important fact or not be able to answer a question asked by the audience. This got my nerves going and stressed me out the days leading up to the event. This feeling completely changed once I walked up to the front of the class to present. I immediately knew that I had put the time and energy into preparing for this event that I was confident that I knew everything about my presentation that was to know. I came out of it confident and was complimented by many of the professors in the math department.
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At the end of all of this, it is still surreal to me that it is done. This research is something that I have been working on for the last five months of my life. It was just about gaining experience by the end of it, it was about doing the best I could and proudly presenting that work. The fact that I gained experience of independent research in preparation for graduate school was just an added benefit. During this experience though, I did learn quite a lot. I learned that research isn't meant to be easy, otherwise why research it. Also, that it is okay to struggle along the way. Every path will have ups and downs. Don't just think that you not being able to excel at everything the first time makes you a failure or is something to be embarrassed about. One should accept that feeling and carry it with pride, as true experience comes from success AND failure.