Jasmine Duolingo lessons

This week I had 4 participants!! It might not seem like a lot, but compared to the amount of students who already participated in my study (1), it was a lot. I’ve found that recruiting through my participants is more effective than going up to people around campus – you get to form a closer connection with them so they are more inclined to help you find more participants, and it’s more likely that they can get their friends to sign up compared to me (a stranger) walking up to other students. I’ve also sent my flyer to some administrative faculty at the university for them to send it to a list of student emails – this method has led to 3 students signing up just this morning! This upcoming week I have 10 participants signed up so it’ll be a busier week, but I’m super excited that the flow of participants is starting to gain speed. If this momentum keeps up, I might be able to get 30 participants by the end of our time here. 🤞

Latte art

In addition to gaining participants, there were also some other little wins for us here in Puerto Rico. The week started off strong with some Spanish conjugation lessons from Jasmine. For our Duolingo 🦉 adventures, Jin is learning Spanish, Jasmine French, while I’m learning Italian. Jasmine’s lessons were a good building-block for Jin and a good refresher for me. The other little win was me successfully pouring a (recognizable) heart for my cappuccino this week. I still have much to learn but progress is progress ☕️ – this is the same mentality that I’m trying to keep while recruiting participants.

This weekend was a lot of fun – I spent most of my time at the art museum. On Saturday I got to hang out with my cello teacher from Penn State, which is a funny story actually: she left halfway through the semester because she got recruited to go on tour with Bad Bunny 🐰 to play in his orchestra (wild right!?). Anyways, since he was here in PR this week, I asked her if she wanted to meet up since we haven’t seen each other since February. We went out for breakfast and coffee and then spent the rest of the afternoon at the art museum until she had to leave for call time.

Garden portion of art museum

It was super nice catching up with her, and as a little bonus, she sent my flyer to some of her orchestra mates who are from the metropolitan area. Unfortunately, due to a legally binding NDA, I was not able to meet Bad Bunny or know any specific details about the tour – what a bummer.

Then on Sunday, us PIRE fellows went to the art museum for a free event. Rachel and I took the free salsa lesson and were later paired up during the partner portion of the class. We stayed for the live band that played outside in the lovely garden area and tried mofongo for the first time (which is a must if you come to PR). We were able to listen to the awesome band 🪘 while watching super cool, amazing, and beautiful people dance salsa for about an hour – Rachel and I learned a lot and are hoping to incorporate some of their moves into our class on Tuesday. We both had such a great time watching the dancers and are hoping that we can find a group of equally talented dancers back in PA.