Meetings and Technical Update

It truly has been a busy week. As that all us Cal Poly students leave tomorrow, much preparation was done this week. Many of us had to take one or more final exams, and finish final projects for our classes. Thursday night the team went out to dinner to take a small break from preparations and plan the packing of our technical equipment. On Friday we packed everything we needed from the Lair and confirmed some last minute details.

For a little more than the last week I have been helping Sara with the water and society part of ICEX. I worked to install the Omeka database system on the server space provided by the Cal Poly Computer Science Department. Due to my lack of experience in database installation it took longer than expected but on Friday it was successfully installed. The website for the database is not currently in a state that we would like to share with the public but I expect that it won't be very long until it is. Unfortunately, due to the time it took me to set up the database among the other work for this past week, I have not had the chance to work on the programming side of my project but Tyler and Tim have gotten some work done on the mounting of the Otter Box cases.These will house the salinity sensor, the pressure/temperature sensor and the PAM. See the post below for more details.

My Learning Goals

My overall goal is to walk away with a priceless experience that I would try to have again. I want to learn as much as I possibly can both culturally and academically, so these experiences can help to shape me as I move forward through college and my future career.

Some smaller goals I have are to learn more about the robotics and computer science fields. I don't know much about robotics or computer science, so I'm very excited to learn about them and then to compare them to my own engineering field.

My last goal is kind of cliche but I want this program/trip to help me become a better leader and teammate. I know that always seems to be a goal for everything, but I really do think that this would be a great experience to learn something new about being a leader or a team player since we will be working with people of all ages, interests and beliefs.

Going with what Bret did. One of my favorite quotes is "Don't let your schooling get in the way of your education." by Mark Twain. I want to learn as much as possible through this experience, but as I already said, that doesn't strictly mean academic knowledge. I want to learn the culturally stuff too.

I am so excited for this and I hope you all are too!