Last Day of Class

Last night, I had agreed to working on our power point presentation with Bella and Madi (over Skype) at 7:30 in the morning. It was a late night last night trying to figure out the logistics of the presentation, so getting up early was hard. I kept in mind that today was the last day of class, which kept my energy up. We rehearsed it completely through, and it was about sixteen minutes, but we remembered that Cassie had said that we could include clips of the recordings used in the study in our power point presentation.  We chose to include these video clips in the result slide. The clips we chose to include were of the first participant suggesting there was a “spy thing”. We also showed when the first participant told on the confederate, Meg. She said to the administrators, “She took more than one toy… She taked six!” After we put in the video clips, our presentation was long enough. Bella needed to print out her notes, so I went to the printer with her. Then I met up with Oyin, and grabbed some coffee and an apple with peanut butter, before heading to class.

When I got to class, I saw that Cassie had bought snacks for us which we could eat while watching the presentations of other groups. Cassie also brought a friend to watch these presentations. My group was the fourth group to present, and only one group was going after us. I was pretty nervous, but when the time came to actually present, I feel as though I did pretty well. For part of our participation grade, Cassie strongly recommended that we ask the other groups thoughtful questions after their presentation. All of the different groups had very diverse research topics. One group studied if socioeconomic status has a correlation with when children begin to use two word utterances. Another group studied how boys of different ages could identify and categorize emotions shown to them in pictures. The presentations were all very interesting and it was fun to learn about what other people in my class were studying the whole time.

After everybody was done presenting their research project, we all sat down and reflected on our time in the class. A lot of people were very grateful to have had the opportunity to do an actual study and work with kids in the course. It was a very active and hands on way of learning. I personally really enjoyed when we were assigned readings and then the next day there would be time for discussions and opinions on the reading. The class was structured very well in my opinion, so every day I knew what was going to be expected of me. We took some group pictures and said our goodbyes, and then we all left. I was really tired, so after grabbing something to drink at a café, I went back to the dorms to take a nap.

Before long, it was time to head into the city for our last day in Chicago. Unfortunately, Victoria had more work for her class, so she could not go to the city with the rest of us. We were going to take a boat tour originally, but it was pouring rain before we left, so we had a change of plan. We decided that we would go to Millennium Park, then the Navy Pier, we would eat dinner at a restaurant called 25 degrees. At Millennium Park, we visited a garden, and then of course Cloud Gate. We took pictures and walked around a little before walking to the Navy Peer, which took about fifteen minutes.

Millennium Park

At the Navy Peer, we rode the Ferris wheel and saw the Chicago skyline. We went to dinner after a short time at the pier. Dinner was pretty good. The others tried a Chicago-style hot dog, but I decided to get something a little lighter. After dinner we headed back to campus. We were back on campus by about 8:15. I packed for the flight back home tomorrow. Tomorrow I will go back home after a month away, and it is hard to anticipate how I will feel upon arrival, but I will find out soon enough.