Discuss one thing you have learned about research that you were not aware of before starting this journey.
The biggest thing I have learned about research from this experience is that there is always so much more to learn. In most of the tasks I have been doing week to week I usually have to do some background reading/research before I can even start the task. I have read so many interesting papers, but more often than not, a lot of the material in those papers requires even further research. One research paper might lead me down a rabit-hole of five or ten other papers. The research I am doing is in Natural Language Processing, but I have never taken a class in NLP and also had very little knowledge of it before starting the project. Because of this, I have had to a lot of learning on my own to catch up. I started with an online course, and now whenever I do not understand something, I look it up and read about it online. This REU is also the first time I have learned more in depth about machine learning. Prior to this, I knew generally what it was, but had never learned the types of ML. Specifically in the project I am working on, we are using neural networks. I honestly still have a lot to learn about neural networks, but it has been exciting and interesting to learn along the way. It is also valuable to have mentors and peers who are able to help me during the research, and I learn just as much from them as I do from the papers, articles, and videos I have looked at. Although I have had previous research experience, I felt like there was more to learn with this project than I had done for projects in the past. I am proud I have already learned so much in just six weeks, and look forward to keep learning this entire REU program.