It’s finally and actually here. The end of summer has arrived. How did this happen?? I doesn’t seem real to me; how did another summer fly by just like that? It was a great one, but I feel like I’m not finished yet. I still want one more beach weekend or even just a weekend sitting at home with my family around a fire. Those were my favorite. I spent my summer at State College doing research and working out with the team, but many of my weekends were spent at home relaxing with my family. It’s about a 4.5 hour drive back home to New York, but it’s completely worth it. The last hour gets a little rough, but those first few hours are absolutely beautiful. I didn’t fully appreciate how beautiful the Pennsylvania countryside is until I took all those long drives home. Anyway, those weekends sitting on the back patio around a fire with my parents and sister were some of the best moments I experienced this summer. There’s nothing more relaxing than being with the people you love most in this world in your favorite place in the world.
The week and a half spent in Martha’s Vineyard weren’t too shabby either. In fact, I could go for another two weeks spent on the island before school starts to get all of summer out of my system before I have to get back into school mode. The one thing that won’t change much between school mode and summer mode is soccer and my research. While the summer is ending, my research will continue into the year as I am taking on 3 independent research credits. My summer research commitment mostly consisted of gaining an in-depth understanding of the brain volume analysis program and how to use it. Now, as the project is gaining more patients and doing follow up CT scans after the innovative new surgery, it will be my job throughout the fall to continue the accumulation of volume measurements from these CT scans. With these measurements, other members of the project group will be able to determine whether the surgery was an improvement over previous methods. Hopefully, the doctors in Uganda will begin to do their own volume calculations as well (now that Mike has traveled there to give them a tutorial in how to use our Matlab analysis program) so that we can compare our results and make sure the final volumes used are as valid as possible.
This summer was a great one as I said, but my nostalgia brought on by its end is more than compensated by my excitement for this fall semester. With my research, the soccer, and my biomedical engineering courses I am sure it will be an extremely rewarding semester. I am looking forward to seeing how it goes!