It has been a week since my last post and there has much so much going on both in the city and at Gallaudet University. Here is what we did…

This weekend, Maura and I had the opportunity to explore the city and we were very fortunate to have amazing weather while we did it (although very high temperatures required many breaks to drink some water). On Friday night, we attended a D.C classic, Jazz in the Garden! It is a free Jazz concert every Friday night in the sculpture garden during the summer. We went after work to see what it was about and it was incredible. We could tell by the amount of people there that this was a popular activity to do after a long week of work. The sculptures were beautiful along with the fountain and music… a very relaxing combination!

On Saturday and Sunday, we did more exploring with included going to the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, The Museum of Natural History, and my personal favorite, Ford’s Theatre! It was a busy but exciting weekend where we saw and learned so much history!

When we returned to the week, we had a special opportunity to attend the Bilingual Boot Camp where we got to meet other students that are doing research at Gallaudet for the summer. The Boot Camp was both fun and educational as we got to learn more about Deaf culture and Gallaudet University history while also making friends. We even did a two hour scavenger hunt around the campus! One of the topics we discussed was about signing space which includes having the architecture be inclusive for everyone to be able to see others. You can see this even by looking at how the seating area is set up below. Maura and I also got to go on a tour of all of the other labs in the center which included learning about fNIRS Brain Imaging, robot-avatar-thermal tools, and ASL-English bilingual storybook creations. I could not believe how much I learned and I am grateful that I had the opportunity.

While we were busy with experiences around the University, we are also getting back into the research by finishing many summary tables, writing weekly reports, and selecting specific variables in the extensive data set. I know l will be even more productive the next few days and I am excited to check in next week!