Projects, Wellesley, and a Reflection

Good morning readers!

Guess what this week’s post is: SCHOOL PROJECTS! This is good news for me, because the vast majority of my time is spent “doing” school. An interesting question is what the verb is when one is in school, but that’s a debate for another time :).

This past week has been quite a busy one for me. Happily, I don’t have any tests right now, which means I am free to focus on all of my long-term projects. It is taken for granted that the Wellesley education is excellent, and we all go to 1. lectures, 2. labs, and 3. seminars, where we respectively 1. listen to new information and take copious notes, 2. run experiments ourselves (and hopefully follow the science behind each step!), or 3. do assigned readings and then come to class to discuss with our peers and teacher. For science lectures, there are usually weekly problem-sessions, two tests, and a final. For humanities lectures, there are often weekly write-ups, two essays, and a final essay. For labs, there’s usually weekly lab reports. For seminars, there are either essays or tests, depending on whether you’re in the sciences or humanities.

For the 100 and 200-level classes, the above tests and weekly work usually occupies all of our time. However, this semester I am lucky enough to have three long-term, semester-long projects to work on! This is in addition to our normal workload, but it’s meant to be fun. And while the projects are a lot of work, I think it’s the most valuable part of my experience, because I get to apply what I learn in class to some problem to which I’m independently devising solutions.

My first project is for Neuroscience 320: Vision and Art. We came up with our own term projects, given the prompt “it has to have something to do with vision,” and drafted our own experiment. Professor Conway has checked up on us periodically to make sure we’re making progress, but this is an entirely self-driven project. My project is on food-priming, and is rather simple in design and implementation. I figured I’d make it easy for myself, so that when something went wrong (it inevitably does) I’d have the time to fix it :).

The specifics of my experiment are to have someone sit down in front of a computer screen. We have something called an eye tracker, which uses infrared light to track the reflection off of the pupil and the cornea (the clear, outer part of your eye) when you’re sitting in a chair staring at the screen. The reflection off of your pupil shows where you’re looking, while the reflection off of your cornea shows how your head is moving. While the subject is looking at a given picture, we track their eye movements and head movements, so that we are able to later plot the data of what they were looking at.

I show the subject a series of 34 pictures (I put up a powerpoint I made on the screen), and I switch the pictures every 5 or 10 seconds while recording their eye movements. The subject is instructed to sit very still, and look wherever they want to within the picture. I actually created two powerpoints, one a “food” powerpoint and one a “control” powerpoint. In the food powerpoint, I alternate a picture of food with a picture of a restaurant. In the control powerpoint, I alternate a picture of an object that looks a lot like the food picture with the same restaurant picture as before. For both powerpoints, I track the eye data for the restaurant images.

I show half of my subjects the “food” powerpoint and half of my subjects the “control” powerpoint. What I’m hoping I’ll find is that the people who looked at the “food” powerpoint spend more time looking at food in the restaurant picture than people who looked at the “control” powerpoint. So essentially, I’m trying to figure out if food priming works :).

I’ve attached a picture so you can see what some of my sample data look like. The blue circles are where the subject was looking; people tend to look at faces especially. I can analyze the data in several ways—I can look at what people look at (which is generally going to be faces, but I’m hoping there will be some food), I can look at what time they look at objects (I can make a movie of the blue dots to see what order people looked at things), and I can see how long people look at things (do they stare, or do they flit between objects?). I can also look at a whole bunch of other things like how people’s eyes dilate and such, but like I said, I’m keeping it simple :).

It is simply amazing that we all have the opportunity to design and run an experiment like this. We are not expected to produce publish-worthy results; it is just to get the experience of being a real scientists: of coming up with experiments and solving all of the problems along the way. Moreover, all of us in the class have this opportunity, even those of us not involved in undergraduate research. I have never before heard of an experience like this: choosing and designing our own experiments, with no expectations for success, just to enjoy science. If I had my choice, everyone at college would take a class where this was possible—more than any of the introductory-level mixing we do in chemistry, or the cell counts we do in bio, this is science.

Hmm :). So in terms of the problems that have come up, I’ve had a lot of problems getting the data to not fly off the page :). It turns out calibration (figuring out how the light reflects off the eye when the subject is looking at a specific point) is more difficult than anticipated, and the eye tracker data is often too far off to the right, or too far up or down. And programming in Matlab is slow as usual, and I’m not quite sure how to analyze the data a lot of the time. It’s such a process, and I’m so glad I’m able to experience it. I spent much of spring break staring at these pictures and writing code to sort them and extract data from them. So much work, and so much fun :).

So that’s my Neuro 320 project! I’m sure you’ve already heard gobs about it, just because I think it’s so awesome and I’m spending lots of time on it. BUT I HAVE OTHER PROJECTS TOO! And they are just as excellent. The second one, my Making a Difference Through Engineering class, is something very special…

Making a Difference Through Engineering is modeled on MIT’s D-Lab. If you haven’t heard of D-Lab, please go look it up, because it’s approximately the coolest thing ever. It stands for Development Lab, and basically college students come up with engineering solutions to third-world problems. It’s not nearly as easy as it sounds, and projects at D-Lab go on for 10 years or more.

First, one finds a problem that exists somewhere in the developing world. Then, one connects with the people in that community. The engineering students and the consumers of the future product—the people actually affected—communicate all throughout the process, making sure that the engineered solution is actually a viable solution, in that it addresses the needs of the people, is functional in a way that the users will use it, is cheap enough that they can actually buy it, and is easy enough to produce that they’ll be able to manufacture it themselves. This is SO MUCH MORE DIFFICULT THAN ANTICIPATED.

The problem is that people design for themselves. It’s very hard to create a solution that addresses all of the above issues if one is not exposed to the context in which the solution is used. For example, say I wanted to make a corn-grinder, which was hooked up to a bike and powered by pedaling the wheels. Say I already had all of the technology (the bike and corn-grinder, and I had connected them together); all I needed to do was spread it to people, because it worked great in the lab. So I traveled to Tanzania, gave people this bike, and told people to buy it. Everyone nodded along, and then no one bought it.

Suppose I did a follow-up study to figure out why people we’re buying it. Turns out, maybe the bike was great for grinding up corn, but I couldn’t use it as a bike anymore. Or maybe it was too hard to assemble, since there were so many parts to hooking up the bike and corn-grinder, and I don’t speak English (and who reads instruction manuals anyway?) Or maybe I already had a bike, and why would I buy a new bike to grind up corn if I already had a bike? How come I couldn’t just hook up the corn-grinder to my bike? Or maybe the product looked way too ugly, and I wouldn’t want to own that. Or maybe bikes were frequently stolen in the village, so it’d be better just to do what everyone else was doing.

So even if the solution actually addresses a problem (this is also hard to do), it’s very hard to design for someone who isn’t yourself. All of the above issues have actually occurred on various projects, and you need to keep going back to the drawing board, making your product easier, cheaper, and better—make it what the actual consumers want. Successful companies spend millions on making sure their products are what the user actually wants. The situation is the same for creating products for the developing world— but often nonprofits don’t have millions of dollars at their disposal, they work in a country that is not where their consumers are, and less than 90% of even start-up companies are successful anyway!

So the problem is a very difficult one. But the benefits—finding a solution to a problem that would let a mother have more hours in the day, so that she could create a small business and earn extra money to feed or educate her family—are extraordinary. This is engineering to make a real difference in someone’s life, and the implications are so staggering that there is money for this cause, and people willing to spend their lives making steps to accomplish this.

I definitely want to take a D-lab class at MIT in the future, so that I can be involved in one of these long-term projects. But it turns out I don’t even have to go that far, because Professor Banzaert has joined us from MIT to teach her version of the class, called Making a Difference through Engineering. For our first project, we constructed a cookstove out of materials we thought would be found in third-world countries. For most of us, it was our first time in a machine shop, and in groups of three we research, designed, and made a cookstove that we thought would improve on existing models. I posted some pictures about two weeks back of the final products. We couldn’t even boil water with them (ours got to bathtub-temperature!) but the process and the exposure was of immeasurable value.

Now we’re onto our final projects, and what we make actually matters this time. My group’s project is focused on improving a biodigestor for a group of women in Nicaragua, called the Solar Women of Totogalpa. The Solar Women have formed a collective, and make solar products. Their accomplishments (which include a restaurant run solely on renewable energy) are already impressive. They work with a group called GrupoFenix, which was originally founded by students and their professor out of the University of Managua. GrupoFenix does work to help rural  communities live more healthily and sustainably.

For the next five or six weeks, our group of three from Wellesley will be communicating with GrupoFenix and the Solar Women (luckily we all speak Spanish!), trying to isolate the best design that will improve their biodigestor. It’s quite a task, and Professor Banzaert is planning a Wintersession trip to go out and test our initial products in the community. Since this is the first time this class has been offered at Wellesley, what we start now will be the source of the projects for many years to come. That’s one way to motivate us to work hard for a final project—who needs grades, when what you’re doing is starting to change, very slowly and very minutely, the Wellesley and Women of Totogolpa’s world?

So those are two of my projects :). I’ve one more project, for Computer Science and my neuroscience research with Professor Conway (I’ve combined them), but I am almost out of time :). Plus, these two projects I’ve presented are already big enough in my mind! In writing this, I am reminded of the real-life, frankly astounding opportunities Wellesley has to offer. Decisions have already been mailed out to the Class of 2017 (congrats!!!), and I hope you’ll ask me any questions about my projects, or anything else about my Wellesley education!

As a final note, something that has come up over and over again in my head is the value of a college education. High school is great, because you learn all the foundations, and have an inkling of what is yet to come. The first years of college are somewhat similar, in that you’re learning introductory material, and settling into a new lifestyle where you make the decisions. But come junior year, we really get the benefit—we’re finally learning how to think. Run our own experiments, design something that will help someone a world away—we’re learning how to think for ourselves, how to work in the adult world, and that’s something I’m very excited for.

Best to you all and hope you have a great week :).

Monica

ps, My family in Boston, Rachel, Jim, Chloe and Gemma, bought me my first chocolate bunny! I was so excited I ate it all in one sitting (heh heh)