Danny Kim, Entry #5, Final Week at UCLA

This week was mostly focused on working on my small project with the eye tracking using MATLAB. The data I used to input were collected from patients our lab had. I myself went to many of these sessions and tests. We changed the raw data file of eye tracking into excel file in order for it to be able to be inputted into MATLAB. But before that, we only extracted the data we want which are the gaze point coordinates x and y. And to do that we created another folder in the excel file. Using diary, we kept the data that we got from running in the MATLAB and made a excel sheet for them. When on_screen data is too low, we disregarded the whole data from the child because, if the child is looking on screen for a short amount of time, other data are skewed. All the data were evaluated and recorded in one master sheet, which is used to create a visualization- a graph. 

While I thought analyzing and creating graphs were the easiest part of the project, it proved me wrong. I had to edit and revise over and over again. At one point, I was getting very tired of revisions and was starting to get agitated. Then, Scott told me how scientists must be careful and cautious of what they present. He told me that it was essential to be picky about even the smallest mistakes or changes that could be made. It was a moment I learned a valuable lesson as a possible future scientist. I worked on Saturday also for a final checkup for the presentation on Monday for the lab meeting, which unfortunately I had to miss.

Looking back at the six weeks, it passed much faster than I anticipated. I have learned so much over these weeks at Jeste Lab, not only about autism and eye tracking

but also about genetic disorders like Dup15q syndrome, MATLAB, and the attitude as a scientist. It's been a valuable and memorable experience, and I want to thank Dr. Peretz, Dr. Venanzi, and Scott for this great experience.