Over the summer I worked at the John’s Hopkins Applied Physics Lab as a part of their CIRCUIT program. It is a yearlong program from May 2021 to May 2022. Over the summer I worked 40-50 hours a week. Throughout the semester I worked 10 to 20 hours a week, next semester I will do the same.
Gold Level Experience
Intro to the Experience
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
The program I participated was the JHU APL Cohort-based Integrated Research Community for Undergraduates Innovation and Trailblazing, known as CIRCUIT for short. I was one of five undergraduate students working the Multi-Agent Robotic Sandbox (MAR) project. As noted on the APL CIRCUIT website, the purpose of the MARS project is to “build an infrastructure allowing seamless transition from simulation to hardware implementations of robotic interactions with intelligent agents.” My job on the MARS project was to take charge of Computer Aided Design (CAD) assignments and hardware aspects of the project. Additionally, I integrated the hardware with the virtual simulations and connected them to the network as well.
JOHNS HOPKINS
APPLIED PHYSICS LAB
Self Reflection​
RESEARCH
I learned that I am persistent. I have struggled to make progress with all my responsibilities. I struggled to remain feeling useful to my team. It took more persistence than I thought I had to continue pushing through this project. This project allowed me to narrow down my research interests. I am, now officially, certainly moving forward with my interest in hardware.
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I am most proud of my improvement in hardware capability. I had never worked with them before. Over the course of this semester and this past summer, I gained a lot of technical knowledge regarding not only robotic hardware but also computers themselves. I used my novice coding ability to build computers and link them to our network and infrastructure. These skills I can take with me to other projects.
Learning Objectives
PROGRAM WIDE
Research takes persistence. Most of the solutions I tried will not work the first time, I need to continue searching for solutions and be flexible in my process. It is more beneficial to fail quickly than to hold onto an idea that may not work.
Persistence
EXPERIENCE
Formulate questions and hypotheses within the discipline.
When I am given a problem, I don’t know how to solve I must ask myself what I want to happen and what is happening now; I must hypothesize a method to get from one state of operation to the other.
PERSONAL
In order to grow as a researcher, I need to understand the way they think and how they solve problems. I must be able to think out of the box solutions, doing so will set me apart from my peers and make me an asset to any lab I join.
Nature of Disciplinary Knowledge and Creativity.