William Ma, Entry #1, Amazing first week @NYU

My first week at NYU was busy yet truly amazing, and I am very excited to share what I've learned (and some funny things) with you guys.

First of all, NYU is a great choice for me since I've lived in New York for two years before coming to Peddie. I love the action and energy that permeates this city.

Let me start off by telling you a funny thing that happened during training. I got home on Wednesday the 1st after exams and my training with Dr. Sulik (one of my PI) was scheduled two days later on Friday. Here's the location:

By the way, my lab is only a 20 minute walk to Chelsea Market, aka the BEST seafood place :)

 A beautiful elevator (It actually has another door that opens on the side so that's cool)

Taking Dr. Peretz's advice, I dressed appropriately in classroom dress (Peddie Dress Code goes everywhere). I arrived at my lab at 8:30 on Friday, half an hour early for my scheduled time for training. The lab was almost empty.

 

(This photo was taken at 9:45 on a monday. There's about 3 people in the lab)

I walked down the hall, found someone, and asked whether Dr. Sulik was in yet. She said no and suggested me to take a seat and wait for him. So I did. I looked around my lab. My lab is an office setting. Since it is located on the 8th floor, the view is pretty good, and I can't tell you how excited I was when I saw NYU's tennis courts:

 I love tennis.

A couple of minutes later, someone came in, talked to the person I just asked, and eventually sat down next to me. Looks like I'm not the only one scheduled for training. Unlike me, however, he was dressed in family-style. (Peddie Dress Code goes everywhere) You should've listened to Dr. Peretz and Dr. Venanzi, I thought to myself. As it approached nine, about 3 or 4 more people starting coming in, all in suits or dresses. They looked like college students. A lady walked to us and said "We'll be ready for you guys in a moment." I looked at their blazers, and then my polo shirt. I started to worry. Am I the one dressed inappropriately? (Hopefully I won't be sent back to change, like at school) Oddly enough, to me, they looked more nervous than I did. Calm down, guys. I'm only in high school and I'm not even nervous for training. (EXP prepared me well)

I eventually talked to one of them to confirm they were here for training.

"No, I'm here for an interview." One replied.

Awkward silence... "Ok, thanks."

That's when I found out that my lab does not cover the entire floor.

I eventually met Dr. Sulik, who meticulously prepared me for his meta-analysis project.


That was an appetizer. Here's the main course.

I'll be working on three different projects over six weeks: CSRP (Chicago School Readiness Project) with Dr. Raver and Mike, a Meta-Analysis on the effects of internalizing factors such as depression and anxiety on self-regulation, and an individual project that is likely to be a literature review on a topic that I like.

CSRP: Most of the time I am working with Mike, who is Dr. Raver's research assistant. He supervises me and gives me help whenever I need it. Besides simple (yet very important and meaningful) tasks such as verifying data, I am now being trained in data cleaning, which is quite complicated because I have never done computer programming before. However, I am still very happy to learn it and do whatever the lab needs me to do.

Meta-Analysis: I am one of the many interns who's working on the Meta-Analysis project under the supervision of Dr. Sulik. I think there are about 50 interns working on this project and I am the only high school student. The Meta-Analysis project is on the effects of internalizing factors such as depression and anxiety on self-regulation, and Dr. Sulik will eventually produce a literature review of all the studies that applies. The project is currently in stage two, where the interns screen about 3000 studies based on their methods and measures (stage one involved 9000 studies and were screened based on the abstracts). I am on the self-regulation team and my job is to go through studies and determine whether they have measures of self-regulation. This is actually more difficult than it sounds because sometimes there may be ambiguity. In fact, we have a self-regulation measure dictionary with over 600 different measures of self-regulation. (The number is still increasing as we screen more studies)

Individual Project: Dr. Sulik also supervises me as I work on a literature review on a topic that I like. Psychology covers a wide range of areas and right now I'm trying to find out the topic that I am most interested in.

Let me talk a little about commute. I live in Forest Hills, Queens. I spend a little less than two hours on the subway each day. I am used to this since I had to take two trains and a bus to school each day when I was in New York before coming to Peddie.

Most of the time I just grab a newspaper to read on the way.

My working space changes from time to time.

I also join in the weekly lab meetings every Tuesday to listen to all the exciting things going on in the lab and talk about my own projects.

Lab size: Although there are a lot of interns involved in the lab, most of them only come in once or twice a week. Typically, there's around ten to fifteen people in the lab. The most people in the lab that I've seen so far is around twenty, working on various projects.

To sum it up, I've been having a great time at NYU. I've met friends and had good food. Most importantly, I learned a lot about the projects I've been working on as well as what it's like to be in the world of science!

Last but not the least, the people in my lab are great. They are all so kind, friendly, and smart. (By the way Mike and Dr. Sulik also want to see my blogs so I'm sharing it with them.) 

Thanks for reading and I'm excited to read everyone's posts as well!