This week was very eventful! On Monday, I prepared to give my presentation on my project at the lab meeting. It was an amazing experience, I received a lot of helpful input from the other lab members. Monday was also my 'donut day,' I brought in homemade cookies for the lab members during the lab meeting and they all loved them!
On Tuesday, I worked on identifying the differences in the community structure between the interference and non-interference groups. I computed a z-Rand score for the community assignments for the two groups and got a score of 0.0180. This result is very good, it means that the community partitions of the two groups are significantly different from each other. I was very excited by that result. I then went on to plot the community assignment of each node onto brain surface plots, where the nodes were colored according to community assignment. I continued working on that on Wednesday.
Thursday was my last day physically being in the lab, however, Dr. Bassett and I met and decided I would continue working on my project throughout the school year. I am very excited to continue with the research. I will be touching base with her every week or so to discuss the progress of my project. We also discussed the new paths we plan to take in my project. We decided to dig further into the differences between the interference and non-interference groups. We think that focusing on using those two groups is better than the four scenarios I was working with previously because we don't have to explain how learning is involved in the process. After we discussed the new path I will take, I realized that the 'paper' I was writing before is more like a collection of all the steps I took, a lot of steps that we won't mention in the actual paper we will send for submission. We will be writing the true paper as we explore more and start to see more results. Dr. Bassett and I had a very nice conversation where she told me that I am seeing what true science is like because we we are exploring many different paths in order to get the results we want and we are forced to think critically about every step. My project is difficult to see results in immediately because we are looking for a very specific sub-network that predicts the interference effect. Dr. Bassett said that we should eventually have enough information to write a paper and she also told me that she would be using my project and results in her grant proposal later in the year. I am so happy to know that I will be helping the lab in this way! At the end of the meeting I asked Dr. Bassett if she could write my college recommendation and she said she would be very happy to write one for me.
Although I am sad that my time in the lab is over, I am very excited to continue working on my project throughout the year. The prospect of having my own research published is amazing! This experience in the lab was eye-opening and made me realize how I really want to continue with research in the future. I really enjoyed getting to know the lab members and learning what it is like to be in a lab.
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