by Sara Carter
This past week was our last week of collecting data here in Granada and it has absolutely flown by, as we have been rushing to try to get in as many participants as we can before we finish as well as making preparations to leave Granada. As luck would have it, Alvaro and I have found new participants at a greater rate this past week than at any other previous time here and have rushed to get them on the schedule to ensure that we would be able to run them on both sessions by the end of the week. Luckily the people that we found were extraordinarily cooperative in working with us to find two separate times that would work for them as well as fit into our available times for our lab space. Wednesday and Thursday, my last two days of running participants, were as full as our lab schedule would permit, which was actually a really great way to end given how many other days I found myself much less busy than I would have liked due to difficulty finding participants. On Thursday I actually ended up spending a total of eight hours just running participants, at the end of which I could barely remember what sunlight looked like as I emerged from our lab in the basement of the library that I have taken to referring to (ever so fondly) as The Cave. This morning Alvaro and I met for the final time to go through all of our data to ensure that it was complete for each of our behavioral tasks and that we both had the files from all of the data we are sharing. He also helped me to go through the data from my own experiment to make sure that the results were spread evenly across my four experimental files. I was so glad to have him there to help me with all of this because he has a great deal of experience with organizing and backing up data, given how many different groups of participants he has run on his current study alone (not to mention he has a bit of OCD going on, which does in fact come in handy in this type of undertaking). We also went through all of our receipts to make sure we had documented all of our participant payments and had added them all up correctly. After making sure that I had all of my equipment and packing up the enormous hard drive containing our data (that I have the distinct pleasure of carrying to safety at PennState) and saying goodbye to Alvaro for the last time that I will be seeing him on this continent, I took my final walk down to the bus stop with mixed emotions (as well as a bit of exhaustion).
Earlier this morning as I walked up the steps to get the keys to unlock our lab for the last time, it struck me how long ago it seems that I first walked up those stairs with Alvaro and Amelia the first time we came up to meet with Teresa and everything about the Facultad de Psicologia still seemed so unfamiliar. When I think about every time since then that I have walked up these same stairs as such an ordinary part of my daily life without giving it so much as a thought, it is pretty strange and rather difficult for me to conceive of the notion that I won’t be doing so again. I have come to feel so comfortable in this setting that I used to find almost intimidating as I looked at the other members of the lab together or at the groups of undergraduates seated on the front steps talking with friends and felt like I was just a visitor here, looking in at its goings-on from the outside. I of course wasn’t able to foresee then that the waiter at the cafeteria would come to know without asking what kind of coffee I would order or that I too would end up sitting on those same front steps with a group of people I had become familiar with. It’s really crazy to think that as an undergraduate I’ve had this chance to get to know this foreign university in such a different way than I would have had I instead been studying abroad and only taking classes.
As I finalize travel plans with my mother who is coming to meet me in Spain at the end of the week and as I watch the other girls run about making the final arrangements for their own travels, the reality is beginning to set in that the temporary lives we carved out for ourselves here and the routines we fell into are actually coming to an end. I must admit that it feels good to have completed what I came here to do and to know that I have all of the data I’ve spent these weeks collecting backed up and ready to go, all of it organized and complete. I am also definitely looking forward to seeing my mom with whom I will be travelling to the north of Spain to take a road trip along the coast. Yet this past week as I have been walking along the streets that have carried me through my days in this city or as I go to sit in a plaza near my apartment or stop into a café that I frequent, a nostalgia has begun to permeate my positive sentiments regarding leaving. The idea that the feeling of ownership that has colored my experience of this place will rapidly fade and next week at about this time I will be closing the door of my apartment here behind me for the last time is really difficult. Two months is a peculiar amount of time to spend in a place because unlike in a study abroad program, in which I would likely have lived in another country for about four or five months, throughout my time here I was quite aware that this would all be ending in what amounted to a matter of weeks. On the other hand, two months is still an adequate amount of time to really grow to know a city well and establish oneself there, particularly as we had our own apartment that we cooked in and kept clean and had a role at the University that structured and lent a sense of purpose to my daily life here. When our group of friends, which was mostly comprised of members of the lab group, all met at a café one night this past week to get together for the last time and say goodbye to everyone, it was hard to divert my thoughts from the idea that this was most likely the last time I would see them again. Attempting to shrug off this sadness and enjoy my remaining time, I have been doing quite a bit of walking around the city these past few days, thinking about all of the positive experiences I have had here, as if seeking to archive it all somewhere in me to hold onto.
Looking back on the fairly limited knowledge I had when I first arrived here of what it actually means to conduct research, it is now apparent to me how much I have learned over the course of my time in Granada about the practice of directing a project. With a great deal of instruction from Amelia and Alvaro in areas with which I had no previous experience along with some of my own experimentation, for example in developing my own manner of explaining tasks to participants, I feel that I have been able to gain significant experience in the various aspects of data collection. The first few times I ran a participant I was somewhat hesitant and stumbled over my words a bit as I explained the tasks but after going through it all several times, I became so familiar with repeating those same instructions that I could do so almost without thinking. Much as going through the tasks came to feel so automatic to me and I genuinely enjoyed meeting my participants, each session I run entails five different tasks, so I day in which several were scheduled in a row could certainly feel like a long one. Having some such days that were tiresomely full while others seemed to entail almost too much free time enabled me to see the potential variability in the pace of a research project, as well as to experience the entirely self-directed time management that Amelia indicated to me was more like how graduate school was structured. Preparing for and giving the presentation of my project at our lab meeting here was also an incredibly valuable experience because it provided me with an impetus to structure the ideas and information that underlie my project as well as getting me acquainted with speaking about it in front of a group in a more formal setting. Even just repeatedly explaining my project to various people, such as participants who were curious as to the particulars of the experimental tasks they had just completed, has gotten me to a point at which I feel entirely at ease talking about it. My experience in Granada has provided me with so many opportunities to learn about research, to get to know this city and other parts of Spain, and more generally to get used to living independently and being entirely responsible for myself. I am both tremendously sad to see this time come to a close and appreciative that I have gotten so much out of it to take with me going forward.