This project truly taught me how to work efficiently alongside a team, as I was constantly working in collaboration with my team member, Kevin Collins, and our mentors from the Colorado School of Mines. It was particularly important that I learned to communicate well with Kevin and our mentors, since we were conducting research from a mostly virtual setting. As a result, we all worked hard to ensure that everyone understood the concepts being discussed, due to the difficulties of collaborating while remote. At every Zoom meeting, we asked in-depth questions to reinforce every member's understanding of the project. Whenever Kevin or I were unsure about something, we first tried to work out an answer between the two of us, but would contact our mentors if were unable to reach a definitive answer. Professor Klein-Seetharaman and Dr. Kumar were incredibly patient with our many questions and always provided us with the best explanation when we were confused. They provided many suggestions which we incorporated throughout our project, particularly when creating our presentation slides. Often, they were little details we wouldn't have noticed, such as the placement of certain bullet points on a slide. However, such small changes elevated our project to be even better. Overall, they helped us build the best project that we could, given the circumstances of the pandemic and the remote format.
Kevin and I also worked hard to collaborate as effectively as possible. When gathering our project results, we split up the work evenly between us to ensure that each partner was doing their fair share of work. Additionally, we would typically work while in a voice call so that we could discuss the project in real time while we worked and ask questions if were unsure about something. We frequently communicated whenever we had ideas or concepts we wanted to share, so that both of us were coming up with original ideas for the project and putting our heads together to build the project to be the best it could. This project is absolutely a product we are proud of, and I believe Kevin and I both enjoyed the experience and learned a lot about conducting college-level research.