Successes
I felt successful when I was able to master the technique of measuring lateral and medial tibial angles using a new software, Dragonfly, with little error on each trial, so I was able to reproduce the same angle. This is essential because it will allow us to display reproducible results in our publication. To obtain this success, I communicated with my teammates and asked for tips and strategies they found helpful and continued to practice repetitively so I could find landmarks and orientation techniques that allowed me to find the same slice every time to measure the angle from.
Challenges
The most challenging part of my experience was when I misunderstood the instructions of how to take the femoral angle measurements and didn’t change the slices, so I missed trying to find the right slice again using special landmarks that I found helpful. This practice was necessary because each slice varied a little, so being able to factor in the variability and find similar angles was essential for the study. To overcome this challenge, I made sure to confirm my understanding of the task before I started so I could clear any confusion and prevent this mistake in the future.