Sadly, I have reached my final week working officially on my PIRE project. When my advisor first told me about the program, I had no idea what to expect and wasn’t entirely sure if it would be for me. But now that I am reaching the end of this experience, I am so glad that I did! Throughout the spring semester, I worked to prepare everything for this summer, and even then I didn’t fully know how it was going to go. I spent the first few weeks of summer trying to figure out how to schedule participants efficiently. I learned a lot about how to schedule groups of participants for the same time. Then, once I had participants scheduled I had to actually run those participants. As it turns out,, running participants is also a skill that must be learned, and I slowly got better at it over the weeks. I have one final group to run this next week, and after that the only tasks left for the summer will be to fully code and upload all the data. 

These weeks have honestly gone by so fast and I cannot believe that it’s almost August again. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything I’ve accomplished this summer. Obviously the biggest achievement is successfully collecting data in a time when finding participants is very tricky. But in addition, I’ve also learned a lot about collecting data and research in general. I now feel much more prepared for when I do more research in the future. I have experienced multiple instances of things going wrong, so if the same things come up in the future I will better know how to handle them. This is my first experience working on an independent project, and I feel much more competent coming out of it than I did going in. 

As well as practicing general research skills, I feel that I have gotten several opportunities to sharpen my communication skills both during meetings and through emails (this project has involved writing so many emails!). 

And finally one of the most interesting things that I gained during this project was insight on the German perspective on remote learning. Through listening to my participants discuss their experiences during the remote learning period, I have gained a sense of the differences and similarities (of which there are many more than differences) between the American and German experience of remote learning. Probably the most interesting trend to me is that regardless of where the participants are from, most people had the same complaints and experiences. I think this potentially gives a really interesting insight into the universal strengths and weaknesses of the remote learning format. 

Even though this is technically my final official week of PIRE, I am still certainly not finished with this project. I will continue to finish coding the data before the end of the semester, and then I will be on to analyzing the data and compiling it into a presentation. I’m excited and curious to see what I’ll find in the data. And I’m stoked to see this project through to the end! Thank you to anyone who’s read my blogs these last few weeks, I’ve had a great time writing them!