Week 4 Post (6/10 - 6/16)

In the fourth week of my DREU Research Program, I spent a significant amount of time addressing comments on my pull request for one of the autograders. I dedicated about two days to working through the comments and improving my autograder. Once completed, I claimed a new autograder to work on. Unlike the previous autograders, which were for the “labs” section of the course, this new autograder is for the “assignment” section. Assignments are more challenging for autograders due to their open-ended nature. I spent the rest of the week trying to understand the assignment, its basic requirements, and how students could potentially write buggy solutions for it.

We also dedicated time to writing our final draft of the research proposal for the UR2PhD course, incorporating feedback from another student research team. In addition, we created a rough 10-minute presentation to present our research proposal. We worked on the slides and recorded the presentation. This week marked the final week of the UR2PhD course, leaving me with a bittersweet feeling. I learned a great deal about how research works and how to seek help, making the course an invaluable experience.

We did not read any research papers this week since we had a lot on our plate. The presentation for the UR2PhD course took us almost a full day, so we decided to focus on our immediate tasks.