Last week and heartfelt goodbyes.

It's hard to believe summer is already over. The experience I had at the ICERT internship has been unique and unforgettable. I learn so much in these past two months, and I met so many amazing people. I feel so grateful for this opportunity.

On Wednesday, we had to present our poster at SRS Poster Session along with all the other students that have also been doing research at UT. I think almost everyone from ICERT did a very good job presenting their research. We were able to set up a tower and a desktop with the Oculus Rift next to our poster to show our rough demo. We had some really good feedback from the people that stop by to hear about our project and try our demo. Even Rosalia Gomez stop by our poster and tried it out. They thought it was a very interesting concept, and they like the demo as well. We also got some constructive criticism about the demo on how it was now and on how it could be improved. Mostly they said that they were more affected by the sounds, as in the heavy breathing of the character and the Tinnitus audio. They also said the intensity of the blurry camera could be increased.

Poster presentation at the SRS Poster Session at UT at Austin

Marvis and I spent the rest of the week finishing the final paper that was due for Thursday night. Marvis concentrated in doing the abstract, the literature review and the introduction. Meanwhile, I did the methods and materials, the conclusion and the appendix. We were able to finish most of it by the evening, and even gave Dr. McCann a draft so he could edit it for us.

Friday was the Goodbye Celebration Ceremony, where all the ICERT interns spent some time together and with the TACC mentors one last time. It was a bittersweet moment to hang out with students that I had been working with all summer. I'm really going to miss many of them. Afterwards, Rosalia told us she has some gifts for us, which included more USBs, a TACC lanyard, and a letter and a cup for our parents. I thought that was very sweet of her.

Again, words cannot express how thankful I am for this opportunity. I acquired new skills and learned new things that I wouldn't usually learn at classes. I got more experience in game development with the game engine Unity3D, got experiences developing for virtual reality and working with the Oculus Rift, learn to program in C#, and acquired new knowledge about what a seizure is and the states it unfolds. I am really excited to continue this project and get IRB human subject approval to acquired data.

I'm also more inspired to do a masters. I'm still trying to debating between doing a masters in Computer Animation, Computer Graphics or Cinematography. However, I'm very motivated to look for different schools once I acquired enough funding for it. Thanks to my peers Marvis and James, I want try to go to conferences and network with professionals in the fields I'm interested in. It would be great if I could meet a professor or a researcher whom I could do research with and help me fund my graduate studies. I'm also motivated to work harder with my courses in order to keep developed my skills further.