I continued working through courses on machine learning with a focus on unsupervised machine learning. This was much harder to wrap my head around than supervised machine learning by nature of how it works and how it is not interpretable.
The idea for a secondary DREU research team was pushed into action, and a couple people showed up! I think being able to talk to each other about our struggles with remote research and working together through them was very helpful. One of them mentioned that they had been struggling with getting a library working for a couple days which really demotivated them, but coming to the meeting and seeing that they’re not alone gave them the boost they needed to not let bugs get the better of them! It was really helpful for me as well. This is my first time doing research so I am not sure how this experience is supposed to go, and I’m often left wondering whether I am doing things right so hearing that other people also have the same worried that I do really helped me. Some people who showed up often couldn’t be at meetings because of time constraints, so we just started texting each other. Other people didn’t really show up for various reasons some being different research periods, different accountability tactics that work, and redundancy as a lot of them have such daily meeting with their mentors. So I decided to stop having them.