LAST WEEK! This was officially my last day and week of the DREU program. I cannot believe it is over already. I feel as if I had just started all my work and was nervous about messing things up. It is crazy how fast time passed. I have learned so much and met so many amazing people. I submitted an extended abstract, gave an oral presentation at a conference, attended multiple lab meetings, and got to write so much about the work I am doing. The final report took most of my time this week, it is still not over and I will have to work on it when I get home as well. I will continue to work on the paper with Heng when he needs to submit it for the JCDL conference and will hopefully attend the London conference for my poster. Jodi and Yuanxi gave me great feedback about my work and how I should improve. I could met grad students in the field I am interested in and they gave me good tips about how to apply for grad schools and how to reach out to professors. Jodi agreed to write me a recommendation letter for applications when the time comes and I am glad about that. My roommates and I went out for dinner one last time and then the rest of the time I kept packing up my room. Champaign truly started feeling like home and I am going to miss this place.

The STEM and CAREER Exploration Symposium was the highlight of this week. I gave my first oral presentation, attended many poster sessions and other oral presentations, and also got to meet many local industry professionals. The conference was a very fun-filled but tiring day. It was a little scary to be giving an oral presentation in front of an audience even though I had practiced my presentation in the lab earlier. However, it was a great experience. Apart from the conference, all the lab members also went for a social outing- we went out for lunch to a great Chinese restaurant called Golden Harbour and ordered a lot of delicious food. It was Jodi’s treat and the restaurant had a wide variety of vegetarian options which was a great delight for me. I discussed future work plans with Jodi and we started working on a project with a postdoc student, Heng, whom I had interviewed as part of my requirements analysis for the project initially. I worked on the pipeline and edited it to input and output text files and got results for his use case that were needed for a paper he will be writing. I am excited about being part of an actual paper! I went out with my roommates for boba and ramen, I will miss them too! I can’t believe I will soon be leaving. The other DREU student had to leave this week only because of housing leases, so I went out with her for ice cream one last time. This time next week I will be bidding this place goodbye as well.

Week 8 was mostly spent on making my presentation for the STEM CAREER Exploration and Symposium: Illinois Summer Research Program Alliance on July 26, 2023. I learned how difficult it can be to accurately depict your entire research project on a PowerPoint presentation to an audience not from the same background. My mentors and I spent a lot of time going back and forth on the slide layouts and content. We particularly spent more than 4 hours constantly changing the content of one slide that depicted what a custom dataset should look like. I got a little behind on writing my paper for the DREU Milestone 4 and I need to have a first draft ready by the next week so that we can improve it. I have realized any kind of document goes through multiple changes before it is submitted and I need enough time for those changes to occur so that I can submit the paper on time. I will be giving another presentation at the iSchool Colloquium on Aug 2, 2023, but I am not too worried about that. Furthermore, I have to update my pipeline and test 300 papers on it and write an analysis report on that which will be included in the paper I write. I have realized that there are many reasons for a full text to not be available even if we have all the information needed. I need to give a report on these problems to my mentor and include them in my paper as well. These are tasks that I need to focus on next week. During the weekend, I spent time improving the presentation and I went to watch Oppenheimer in IMAX with my housemates. The movie was amazing. I hope I can go see Barbie before leaving as well.

It’s crazy how the 7th week got over so soon. It seems like yesterday that I just started the work. This week was mostly working on oral presentations, posters, abstracts, and the DREU final report. I will be giving 2 oral presentations for the STEM and Career Symposium (July 26) and the iSchool Colloquium (Aug 2). I had to submit an abstract for the Symposium. The Wiley TDM API is giving problems because of its licenses and Jodi and I reached out to their customer care team. Hopefully, next week we will know how to deal with it. I gave my code for review to 2 lab members and will be making updates according to their suggestions in the last few weeks. I attended 2 workshops on Resume and LinkedIn profiles and how to better maintain a professional portfolio and network. I attended an all-day Illinois Summer Research Symposium on Friday, July 14. There were mostly graduate students presenting their summer research and posters. Some undergraduates were also there. The Symposium was amazing! I saw so many posters and spoke to a lot of people! I learned a lot about how research goes and can be of so many different types. The weekend was spent in mostly working on my oral presentation.

I finally submitted my extended abstract for the SIGMET 2023 workshop!! This was a significant achievement for me as it was my first-ever submission to any conference!! I will learn by August 1 whether I was accepted or not. The conference will be held in London which is where I am studying next semester for my study abroad semester, hence if I get accepted, I can attend the conference in person which will be a great experience for me! The Tuesday of this week was the 4th of July and I saw the fireworks celebration for the first time. It was a beautiful experience, the fireworks lasted for 30 mins and were very beautiful. The celebrations happened in a huge parking lot and the entire city of Champaign had gathered there. I went there with my housemates and we had a wonderful time!! At work, after submitting the abstract, I was working with the Wiley TDM API, I got a token but it is still not letting me access the full text, even those marked as open access. I need to figure out their licenses in the coming weeks so that I can incorporate that into my full text extraction pipeline. I also updated my poster which I will be presenting for the STEM and CAREER Symposium that will happen on campus on July 26. We have to send the poster for printing this week. On the weekend, I went to buy groceries with my housemate, we went to an Indian grocery store on campus and another Asian grocery store and bought boba later. It was a good weekend!

HALFWAY DONE!! This week I focussed on working on my poster and abstract. As my deadline for the extended abstract comes closer (July 10) I am spending more time on writing the abstract. It is definitely not easy to write an abstract, I do not have any prior experience in writing such scientific papers, hence this is a very challenging process. Finding relevant background and scholarly publications is difficult given the mass volume of papers at my disposal. Thankfully, my mentors helped me a lot. Jodi found me a conference whose papers dealt with work similar to mine, so I had to go through 120 papers published in that conference from 2014-2023 manually to narrow down 3 relevant papers for my use. Another important thing was understanding what kind of visualizations I should add. As I do not have any experimental results, it is hard to come up with statistical visualizations. I ended up creating flow charts and diagrams for my data pipeline and applications. I also conducted interviews with lab members as part of my requirement analysis to better understand applications for my pipeline. My mentors are both travelling in the coming week which means their availability to give feedback for my work will reduce, so I need to finish important work earlier, according to their schedules, which can be a little hectic. One good news was that I finally received my first stipend from Milestone 1, the payment came a lot later than I expected. It should have come by June 15 but did not come before June 27. The weekend was not very exciting because there were thunderstorms happening. I did go to a nice park and a cafe with my friend.

This week had some challenges. I had to parse XML files and realised they are a lot more complicated than I thought. There are multiple formats for XML files and my code needs to be generic enough for every format. The XML formats are determined by publishers, I think, which is why it is harder to generalise the files because there are so many different publishers for scholarly publications. I did more work for my abstract, I started writing the sections. My mentors will be travelling so I need to finish major things before their travel to get proper feedback. I also started work on the 0th poster which I will need to present for the STEM and CAREER Symposium. I attended a seminar on Imposter Syndrome which was quite enlightening and had activities throughout the workshop that were fun. The weekend passed by really fast, I went to a nice Italian place for pizza once and roamed around the campus a lot. I am hoping to get more work done on XML Parsing in the coming weeks so that I can move on to other parts of the project as well.

Week 3 was a blur. I had to give a presentation to the lab regarding my project goals and timeline. I worked on that presentation the entire week. My presentation started off with a background for why my project is needed, followed by an important definition, my main goals, a case study, a 5 step plan to achieve my goals, and a timeline. My professor and PhD mentor gave me lots of feedback throughout the week and I had to make many edits constantly. This was an experience of how iterative all work in the lab is. Additionally, I interviewed another lab member as part of the Requirement Analysis of my project. I also had to start working on reading samples for abstracts since I am trying to send my poster to METSTI workshop 2023 which is a workshop at the annual ASIS&T conference. I have to write a 2-page extended abstract for my project and if I get selected I will get a chance to virtually present my poster. Another cool thing I did was attend a PhD defence. I got to sit in and hear the presentation and question-answers and realised just how much work a PhD is. It was really fun to watch the defence and see the student pass their exam.

My second week involved a lot of learning. I compared between different Python libraries to decide which to use for my work. I am working on Crossref API with Python and eventually settled on using it with the habanero Python library. I have to maintain a lab notebook where I document all my findings and justifications for my methods. I completed creating a pipeline that will extract full-text in XML and PDF form and store it in a MongoDB database as long as the DOI supplied is in an open-access database. I need to work on the publications that are not open access and handle their licenses for text and data mining. Along with that, I have to give a presentation regarding my project description, goals, and timeline next week so I started creating the first draft of the presentation to get feedback from both my mentors. I also attended the weekly lab meeting where we saw presentations from students and also discussed possible social activites. I also went for a sexual harrasment workshop and an ice cream social event. These events are hosted by the university for students doing research for the summer. Overall, it was a good week.

FIRST WEEK!! My first week was fun and unexpected at the same time. I met my new housemates with whom I will be living for the summer. Along with that, on my first day of work, I was introduced to the people in the lab along with my PhD mentor Yuanxi and co-researcher Doreen who is also here from DREU. We spent a lot of time touring the building and campus with Yuanxi and our profesor Jodi. The campus is quite huge and very different from my liberal arts school. It has been a fun but exhausting experience roaming around the city and making 3 meals everyday. I am trying to stay fit by going to the gym as well. I can’t pay for the college gym as it is too expensive but my apartment has a small gym I am going to. That gym is not as great as I would have hoped but better than paying $97 for 2 months for the college gym. Dr. Jodi was very nice to sponsor the bus travel for Doreen and I, so atleast I do not have to worry about going around in the city. The work is challenging and interesting. I am reading the documentation of Crossref API so that I can implement it to extract full-text from given DOIs which I will later text mine. But for now, I watched videos about the API and read the documentation to have a better idea about the process. It is an entirely foreign API for me and hence, it will take some time to understand it. I will make more progress on implementing the pipeline in the coming weeks.