A Brand New Start

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Emily

Hello everyone! I know it’s been a while since you heard from me. This past semester was a little tough. Like a lot of students, I realized the major I was in wasn’t the right one for me. It took some time to figure out because I really enjoyed the artistic and creative aspects of the Communication major, but when I took a Psychology class in the fall, I fell in love with that area of study. That’s why I changed my major to Human Factors Psychology. And even though I’m no longer a Comm major, I’m back to blogging and ready to share what I learned through this process.

For many students right out of high school, a big part of college is figuring out what you want to do for the rest of your life. That can be a lot of pressure! And sometimes students find out that the things they love to do for fun may not be as enjoyable when it becomes study and work. If you find yourself in this situation, you should know you’re not the only one! It’s OK to decide to change your mind. Just to put in perspective, I have a professor who has a PhD student assistant who told us he changed his major 6 times in his undergrad years. While most won’t find themselves changing direction that many times, it does show that you can switch it up and be successful, so don’t let anyone make you feel bad or dumb – just do what’s best for you, do the best you can and continue to learn and discover what you love.

I’ll also admit math has never been my best subject, and even though I did well in my first math class, things went south quickly in the next math class. I really struggled and I was too proud to seek help – I convinced myself I’d be able to figure it out like I had in my first math class. Which was a huge mistake! So I highly recommend seeking tutoring early and often. There’s so many tutoring options, and most of them are free, so there’s really no excuse not to. I learned the hard way so don’t be like me!

Things move quickly in college, so talking to professors, building a support system and connecting with resources before things go bad is really important to your academic and personal well being and health. College students can get so caught up in studies and activities, they neglect mind and body and that is no good. These are my greatest bits of advice that id like to give everyone based off of my own experiences in my fall semester. I just want everyone to take what I say so that you can apply it to your self and realize you are not alone, and its okay to have a bad semester, but to realize the steps you can take, and that also you can speak up and talk to your professors, counselors, and tutors. Embry-Riddle has a wide variety of people who are always willing to help you, and no one wants to see you fail. It’s just up to us as students to take the initiative to speak up and ask for help.

I hope everyone is having a good semester far, and I can’t wait to talk about my new studies in Human Factors Psychology and also my new adventures through my college career.

Leaving on a Jet Airliner

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Carolyn

Before I started the final week, I used my last work weekend to see the San Diego Symphony. A friend of my roommates came with me since the music theme was Fantasia. How can you resist that? I really wanted to see the Firebird Suite by Stravinsky, AND I DID! They played it and I was almost going to cry. The performance was outside in this park on the bay. It started at sunset and the buildings of downtown were so beautiful behind the stage. In the sky, the moon was the brightest it had been in months. I wish I could bring that back home with me.

The view of downtown

The Symphony & Crowds

A few days later I had to say goodbye to one of my best friends in San Diego, Christian. He has been featured in my posts regularly. He was heading to Florida to see his family, and so I had to say goodbye to him before everyone else. To make matters worse, his girlfriend, Desiree, left a few days after that. She was going to see family in Michigan. And so my list of goodbyes began to be checked off. The night before we left, she and I walked down the street to the 50’s themed diner. I had a blast just talking to her, which made saying goodbye even more depressing.

Shakes come and go but friends are forever!

Thankfully, I went to a burger joint on the beach for lunch the next day with co-workers. Hodad’s is famous for it’s delicious, gigantic burgers and scrumptious onion rings. It is so popular that every morning at 11 am when it opens, there is a line down the street of people waiting for food. It was a good thing I filled up because later that day I found out the refrigerator at home was broken. For a few days the entire house smelled a little raw, like pure death. There was no opening up the garage door unless we were absolutely desperate. The good news is that it gave us all an excuse to go out every meal to eat. That got expensive real fast.

The line. wasn’t even open yet

The beautiful interior

My boss bought dinner for me and the other intern one of those nights. She brought along a friend from work. Lorraine has been working with my boss for years. She is an expert in what she does and has a firm grasp on the order or operations at SPAWAR where I work. So essentially, my boss is doing everything she can to get us rehired. And that’s why I adore her!! I am so incredibly lucky to have a mentor that truly cares about my development as a professional no matter where I will be.

On my second to last day at work I was surrounded by every intern. We were all presenting our posters to the crowds of employees at SPAWAR. I even got to keep it and bring the poster home so I could display my work in my lab at school. I have had two weeks to practice, so my conversations were not odd or rocky. Well they were little, but that’s not out of the norm. On my last day, I turned in my badge and said goodbye to everyone. I HATED IT! But when I got home, my roommates knew how to cheer me up.

Me, Deborah (my mentor), and Brittany (the other intern)

My last bike ride to work

They had held a party at our apartment with all of our friends. It was my last chance to hang out with everyone before I left. It was incredibly sweet for everyone to come over and spend time with me one last night. We had some games set up and food ordered. I had a blast and had a mini cry as each person left. The next day my roommates and I did something more. We all got dressed up and went to a restaurant called Solare. That night they had a jazz band play. We were the only ones that danced. But that’s ok the band decided to dance with us. I’m not saying we were the cool kids, but we were the cool kids.

Half of the game fun

The most popular one at the party

Jazz band at Solare

The dancing continued the next night. Sharelle, Laura, Robert, and I went to a class on the other side of town. It was a class where they teach you the basics to Bachata and Salsa dancing. The girls all stand in a circle while the guys move from partner to partner. I basically did nothing. Just kidding I worked my butt off. I thought Bachata was easier, but Laura and Robert disagreed. They are of Mexican descent and are pros at Salsa dancing! After the class Laura was asked to dance immediately. She has all the skills. Robert helped me out a little and showed me a few cool spins that made me look like I knew what I was doing. People still avoided me, though, but it was a good attempt.

I spent the next few days relaxing and getting ready to leave. I said goodbye to my roommate Laura and my other roommate, Sharelle, drove me to the airport. It was so sad to say so-long. I never say goodbye because I always try to see all of my old friends. It is hard moving to different places, meeting new people, loving them as family, and having to say goodbye. So, I will always be a traveling body in order to see them all. I gave Sharelle my last “see you later” hug took off that night at 10:30. I’m not sure if I have complained enough about the awfully loud noise the planes make flying over my apartment out in San Diego. This time I was the problem. And I’m sure the entire city could hear me complaining as I flew over. I could see the lights from my apartment as I flew over and felt miserable. I loved everyone and miss them dearly. It was incredibly bittersweet. I was so sad to leave my new family, but excited to see my real one. My nieces and ERAU friends are waiting for me in Florida. No matter where I go, there is a warm welcome guaranteed. I have to see my nieces now that they’ve learned to walk and get ready to move to my new home in Daytona.

My empty room, just like when I moved in

Got my bags packed

A new plane on the way home

Took over 5 hours! Left San Diego at 10:30 and woke up in Miami at 6 am. Think about it for a minute

Newton signing off 🙂

Procrastinati… oh, I’ll finish that later

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Carolyn

On Sunday night, my roommate and I had dinner and watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” It was a pretty good way to start off the week, because inspiring movies tend to leave you more productive. However, I woke up that Monday just as lazy and cranky as every other day. That attitude changed when I heard news that my favorite formula 1 driver, Michael Schumacher, had come out of a coma. This past December, Schumacher was put into a medically induced coma after a skiing accident. He remained in that state for 6 months. About a week ago I was checking up on him only to find news stories that people “should not expect a recovery” or that “there is no way he would come back if he hadn’t already.” I was so happy to find that he was awake and being transferred to a therapy hospital.

What a great way to start off the week! I was very productive at work, only in the mornings, though. This week I organized and designed a website. I had never done something like this in my classes at Embry-Riddle. I was told exactly how to design it by the engineer. Naturally, as a Human Factors engineer, I ignored everything he said and designed it the way I thought would make sense to the users. This was a hard task as I was never clearly told who the users would be. This past semester, I had a professor who would assign projects and would never really tell us what the end deliverable should be or look like. I could not stand that! That was my least favorite instructor because I was never quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. I have a newfound appreciation for that professor, though. I finally understand that technique because it seems to be the same way the government assigns work. So, an annoying class ended up preparing me the most for the real-world.

I showed one of my advisors the designs for the website and he said it looked good. The next step is to send it to the computer engineers and have them do the programming. Luckily, I am friends with the person that will be writing the code, and he can deal with my obsessive-compulsive nature. That’s why it’s important to be nice to absolutely everyone you meet! Because you may, and will probably, end up asking them for favors somewhere down the road. So the projects for this week at my internship went well… once I worked up the motivation to start moving! I just need someone to throw a bucket of cold water on me in the afternoons and remind me to stop procrastinating.

During my free time at work, I was helping a fellow student and professor in selecting people for a research project. For the past two years I have been involved with a club on campus called Human Performance in Extreme Environments. I was recently elected as the president of the club and have been coming up with activities for the members to do. The purpose of this club is to study how people live and work in extreme environments, like: space, underwater, or in extreme heat/cold. This allows the club members to do really cool things and create studies about it. For example, some of the upcoming events for the fall include: learning to surf, going to the Kennedy Space Center, and swimming at Blue Springs. We are looking to raise money to give some of our team members a chance to go skydiving. However, some of our members were just selected to do something much more extreme.

Sometime in the next year, our members will live and do research at a place called the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. Here, a crew of 7 undergraduate students will live in a confined habitat about the size of a living space that would be on the first rocket to Mars. For these two weeks they do behavioral research seeing how different people are affected by the confinement and isolation from society. This living space is about 30 minutes from any sign of civilization. This gives them plenty of room to do something called EVAs where they dress in a full spacesuit mock-up and walk around outside to collect rocks and other samples from the land. Everything here is very limited, just like it would be on Mars. So, the water tank inside needs to be constantly filled up, leaving each person to take a 1-2 minute shower every 3-4 days. There is limited cell phone service, and the only contact you have is with a team of individuals called “mission support” through e-mail.

Walking out on the Extravehicular Activities (EVAs)

Walking on “EVAs” in the full suit

The first ERAU crew to go to the Mars Desert Research Station.. oh! and their advisor Dr. Jason Kring

So, I spent a few days this week helping select the members that will go on this trip. I went on the very first Embry-Riddle team to go, and was supposed to go on again this past December, but I got very sick a few days before we were scheduled to leave. This new team has never been to this research station before, so there is a lot of planning and training to be done. I am very excited to see what kind of research they will be doing there.

The MDRS living habitat in the middle of nowhere

On the way to the isolated habitat

After planning a few things for that team, I was basically done with all the work for projects at my internship and at ERAU. It was a very long, but rewarding week. I spent Friday night at a baseball game with my roommate and some friends from work. We drove downtown to Petco Stadium to see the Los Angeles Dodgers play the San Diego Padres. I loved watching the game, but I’m not entirely sure who won. Yes, I am awful with sports. I couldn’t even read the score board properly. The only thing that matters to me is if the guys playing are handsome. Which they were, hence why I don’t know the final score. The rest of the weekend I stayed home and wrote up a few papers for home. It was generally uneventful, but that was needed since next week is going to be horrific!!!

Padres vs. Dodgers game

Fun at Work

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Carolyn

I did not want to go to work this week. I was having so much fun this weekend. I had kayaked across the San Diego Bay (and by across I mean about 30 feet). It goes right alongside the airport so I was secretly being a Riddle geek staring at planes when I should have been paddling. It’s ok I only got yelled at twice. I had gone with my roommate Laura, her brother, and a friend. Afterwards, we were so hungry we went to a restaurant downtown and I had a giant burrito, even though I really wanted the chicken and waffles. That night, as I was still eating the burrito, I watched some reruns of The Nanny. Don’t make fun of me, you all love that show you just don’t know it yet. And Fran Drescher has the voice of an angel.

On Monday I went to lunch with a co-worker who gave me a lot of information on the benefits of working for the government. He talked about how being an employee at our company funded the education for his higher-level degrees. This was good to hear in the hopes that this company invites me back for another internship or possibly a job. I also applied for graduation this past week! Since I got an internship, I get 6 credits knocked off of my requirement to graduate. That means I will be graduating an entire semester early! Guess I’ll have to start practicing walking across a stage. No I won’t actually do that, if people saw me they would recommend me to a psychiatrist.

For my current projects here, I have been tasked with some pretty unique projects. I have been researching control interfaces for operating unmanned vehicles. I was also tasked with creating a set of classes and workshops for human factors instruction. These will be courses given to people working for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) on how to make designs user-friendly and how to do user/usability testing. I used a lot of material from those expensive books I bought for my classes. So, they may come in handy for at least one other short period of your life.

Later in the week, I was tasked with doing research with the employees at SPAWAR who are completely blind. I asked them to do a “think-out-loud protocol” while they used a screen reader to navigate through a website. Human Factors researchers use this method to “see” what is going on inside the head of a participant (without opening it up). We ask a participant to say what they are doing, thinking, or feeling while they perform a task. For this particular study the participants were using software called a screen reader that reads everything shown on a webpage to them as they navigate through it. Imagine navigating through a website with a blindfold over your eyes based on how someone is describing it to you. That’s what the participants were doing as we tested. And they did awesome because they use that program for every task they do for their job. I finished that day feeling like a lazy employee compared to these guys.

Within SPAWAR, my division decided to promote the awesome people that work here. So they decided to get the branches from our division and film a couple of clips of the people in each branch dancing to the song “Happy” by Pharrell. My boss brought in embarrassing clothes and accessories and laid it all across the table. Since I am about 3 weeks old here, still very timid, and trying to make a good impression, I did the only logical thing I could think of for that situation. I picked up a princess tiara and pink sunglasses out of the pile of accessories put them on the 50 year old guy standing next to me, and somehow convinced him to let me be the leading man in a swing dance. We danced better than everyone else, except I was too short to spin him around.

On the subject of dance, I also signed up for some classes. A few weeks ago I signed up to do a beginner’s adult ballet class. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but I got pushed up to an advanced class too early and did not understand any of the French these crazy teachers were speaking. I could remember looking at the other girls’ feet on the night of the recital. So, I decided to have another go at it in the hopes that my chicken arms get some tone. In reality chickens probably have much more upper body strength than me. Anyways, I did my first class and surprisingly remembered a few words and positions. There were a few girls around my age, but most of the women were older.

As part of giving interns out-of-work learning experience, every Thursday SPAWAR hosts a technical seminar in a variety of areas. This week was advanced photonics and the potential uses for this area of study. Another speaker brought in Google Glasses and showed some of the cool functions of it. As part of the Human Factors GEARS Lab, I was the only student in this group who had even seen Google Glass in person. In case you were wondering, yes, I felt special. The same speaker talked about some cool apps available that can turn a sheet of paper into a 3-D image, or overlay a digital image to a 6-sided block. If you have a smart phone, download Elements 4D by DAQRI or Enchantium. They both are cool augmented reality apps for your phone!

On Friday night I learned how to play poker. I had played Texas Hold ‘Em before, but forgot everything I learned. My roommate, Sharelle invited me to her friends house where there were two very large tables set up. I actually received tremendous help from the gentlemen at my table. Two of them would look at my cards and tell me what to bet, when to stay in, and when to give the other guy dirty looks. I bought in for $10, and walked out of that joint with a whopping $7 more. Don’t act like you’re not impressed. Not bad for a first-time-in-a-really-long-time-er. At that point I had decided that there is no way I will make more than $7 and decided to cash out and go to another friend’s house. Once we got there, we busted out the Wii and played Mario Kart. Sleepy and delusional I crashed into every wall in the game and came in 7^th place at best. My gaming ability was really top-notch that day.

My Life @ Riddle

Daytona Beach Edition

Tag Archives: Human Factors Psychology

A Brand New Start

Leaving on a Jet Airliner

Procrastinati… oh, I’ll finish that later

Fun at Work