When I came to Nijmegen, I was not at all ready to test participants. I had nothing but a list of target words and pictures to match those words. All of my stimuli had to be recorded here in Nijmegen. That very first Thursday, I completed the first round of recording the words for the part of my study that would be in English. Luckily, I was put into touch with an intern (a research assistant) who lent me her voice for the recordings in Dutch. Many recording sessions later, I finally have good quality recordings for over 100 words in both English and Dutch. I was ecstatic that the recordings were finished! Finally, I felt like I was making progress with putting my project together.
I thought that after the recordings were finished, the road to having a complete project would be easy to navigate. I was very wrong about that one. The next step in this process was more stressful than the last one. For every recording I made, I had to annotate the voice onset times. While this task was not extremely difficult, it was time consuming and required a lot of patience. Once all of the annotations were complete, the recordings were given to a graduate student at Radboud who graciously volunteered to help me with this project. She added the finishing touches to all of the recordings to make them ready for use.
Once again, I thought the hardest part was over. Once again, I was wrong. The next step in this process was to modify 6 existing E-Prime scripts for use in my project, which was relatively easy. Adding in all of the stimuli was the most frustrating part of this. I thought I had entered in each file name correctly (by the time I had hundreds of file names to input). Somehow, there was always a tiny error in a file name somewhere – causing the script to crash. For four days straight, all I was doing was fixing errors in the script. The closer the scripts were to completing the trial run, the more hopeful I became and the more frustrated I was that the scripts continued to crash.
The first time one of the scripts completed the trial run, I thought I had broken the system. The computer screen went blank and switched to the E-Studio window. (E-Studio is the program used to edit E-Prime scripts.) There was no error screen. There was nothing. I am ashamed to say it took a good 5 minutes for it to sink in that the script was actually working. After that, getting the other 5 scripts to run seemed like a piece of cake.
After the scripts were running, there were some tiny problems that needed to be fixed. A lot of e-mails were sent in the following days to troubleshoot these problems. Within a couple of days, all of the issues with the scripts were resolved. Finally, during week 5, I began testing.
Setting up this project was a rollercoaster of emotions. At times I was so frustrated that I thought I would never be finished putting the project together. At other times, I was overly optimistic about how quickly I would be able to fix issues with the scripts. A lot of people helped me with many aspects of this project, but I am glad they allowed me to be the one that had to deal with the scripts crashing over and over and over again. I learned a lot about starting research projects through this process, but I also learned a lot about myself. Most importantly, I learned that patience really is the key to all great relationships – especially for those including computer programs.