Hi everyone!! I hope you have all enjoyed your PIRE experiences so far!

I have an exciting update to share for this week’s blog post: yesterday (on Monday), my colleague and I completed our pilot testing! I’m happy we decided to do this, as it allowed us to see what aspects of our set-up and data collection were proficient, as well as what areas we needed to work on. I had an extremely fun time setting up the EEG, as the electrode cap and other equipment used here at Beijing Normal University are a lot different than those used at Penn State. It is cool to see how different areas utilize different technologies in order to aim for similar results, and I’ve found this sentiment to be common with other aspects in Beijing as well.

In other news, I unfortunately dealt with a nasty headache last week, that persisted for around 5 days before I ended up going to an international hospital. I used Penn State’s InternationalSOS program, and found it be to extremely useful — if anyone ends up getting sick and has any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out! 🙂 They ended up giving me 3 different medications, and I’m quite glad to say that I’m feeling much better and am on the road to 100% again.

Additionally, We are officially collecting data for two participants tomorrow! I am very excited (and also anxious) to see how this will go — it is the first step in a culmination of many, many hours of tough work. I can’t wait to hopefully share good news about this next week!

–Cam

(The picture attached is a recently painted monument that is present on the main road of the University!)