All of my equipment is packed up and removed from the lab, my keys are turned in, and I am ready to focus on coding.
I ended with a total of 24 participants, only one short of my secondary goal.
My 25th participant was a no-show on Friday and emailed me yesterday (Monday) saying how sorry s/he was for missing the session and how s/he must have been really tired.
I found this email to be ridiculous. First of all, it takes maybe two minutes to email someone and say that something came up and you are unable make it. Even if it were after s/he had woken up, that would still be acceptable (or at least more so). Secondly, if the participant was actually sorry, s/he would not have waited three days to email me back to apologize. Also, the fact that this participant still wanted me to reschedule him/her was amusing to me. A lot of people say that I do not have much patience and that is probably true. So rather than attempting to reschedule and drag everything back to the lab for two hours for someone did not respond in an appropriate amount of time, I decided that 24 participants was a perfectly fine number and was better than I had originally anticipated.
I leave on Friday and it’s finally starting to hit me. Once I get home, I have a few days to recover and adjust and then I start back to work. On top of that, I plan on finishing all (or as much as humanly possible) of my coding before school starts. So if anyone wants to see me, I will likely be spending all of my free time in the basement of Moore. Feel free to stop in.
I still cannot believe that I was given the opportunity to do research in another country. A year ago, I would never have guessed that I would be writing blog posts from Spain and learning how to conduct research quasi-independently. Even though I believe that I have learned a lot in the past few months, I look forward to continuing to enhance my research experience and abilities in the CLS lab.
Speaking of the CLS lab, I cannot wait to be back in the basement. The CIMCYC building is very beautiful and sleek; but, after two years, the Moore building just feels like home.
I cannot wait to continue working with my data and seeing what can be learned from it. The summer slog of sifting through data will be well worth it.