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Ariel Tao - First Week at Boston College

On the first day at my lab, I successfully found my lab and arrived 5 minutes early to Ellen (my lab PI)’s office at Boston College. Thanks to Google Maps! The entire Art and Minds lab was at her office, including the lab manager Nat, my graduate student Jill who led the project I would be working on, five undergraduate students from Boston College, and one undergraduate student from Brown University. I introduced myself to the entire lab, and the lab wrapped up its weekly meeting, where lab members shared new insights and progress on their work. After the other lab members left, I stayed to talk to Ellen, Jill, and Elizabeth (a BC undergrad who worked on the El Sistema project for 2 years already) about the specifics of what I was going to work on. My project, as I had researched before, focused on how orchestral music training affected first and second grade children’s cognitive abilities. It was a three-year longitudinal project, and I was fortunate to work in the lab at the end of the three years, where data had been all collected and available for analysis. My first job, however, was to score the recordings of the interviews conducted by research assistants to the children tested. Elizabeth walked me through the scoring process. For example, in the category fluency test where the RA tested how many words that belong to the category “animals” can the participant think of in one minute, my job was to record the number of animals that the participant thought of, converting the interview into data points. As I am almost done with scoring 100 interviews, I expect to work on statistical analysis of the data in the second week. I am also looking forward to conducting some remaining interviews with Elizabeth in the coming weeks.

I live about ten to fifteen minutes away from Boston College by walk, so getting to the lab has been easy for me. The T Line is the local public transportation, and it’s 5 minutes away from my house. Thus getting to the city center on the weekend was simple for me. My lab PI Ellen Winner is super kind and welcoming. She has a new book coming up and she even asked me for advice when choosing between two designed covers for her book. I definitely enjoyed being in my lab so far and I look forward to the following month of the lab.
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