For any fans of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, you may have already taken notice of the sometimes peculiar language that contestants use to describe their experience. How else to describe the multi-week period of their lives in which they compete against friends and enemies alike, allowing the rest of the world to watch, with the hope of winning and leaving the show engaged? A "process?" No, only Bachelor-franchise super-fans would know, that word is banned. The producers of the show know that such mechanically-connoted language like 'process' sells less than the more rose-colored, wanderlust journey. What, then, does The Bachelor have to do with my research? On one hand, I will take any opportunity to reference especially weird moments of recent American pop culture. On the other, as unexpected as it is, the process/journey analogy is a great way to describe one thing I've learned about research that I was not aware of before starting this REU, which might after all best be described as a journey rather than a process.

What I've learned, in clearer language, is that research can progress in a non-linear trajectory. I knew from the beginning of these ten weeks that our project had plenty of kinks to be worked out but didn't realize how far we were from a single research question. I had reflected a little on what it means to do research generally, but what would it look like to be doing my research? There's a nice cliché that goes something like "trust in the process," but my question is, what is the so-called process? In my mind, a process has clearly defined steps that happen in succession, in line, one after the other, with precision and accuracy.

The past five weeks have been a frenzy of discussing an idea, dissecting it until abandonment, adopting a new approach, dissecting it until integration with some previously abandoned idea, rinse, and repeat. I'd be lying to say I haven't had very real moments of self-doubt and frustration over the past few weeks; I questioned the lack of an itinerary outlining this process of learning design rules, questioned my role in helping us arrive at our destination. But perhaps that was the problem. If our project was already outlined via some order of steps necessary to reach the goal, then why wouldn't someone have already done it? You can describe the different components of research – just look at the headings of a research paper – but when do you know you've found the best algorithm? How can you be sure that you've considered all methods possible? What if it doesn't work?

A journey, meanwhile, is open to mishaps; it's less about arriving at any destination in particular and more about the places you visit along the way. In an episode of Alie Ward's Ologies podcast, personality psychologist Dr. Simine Vazire of UC Davis elaborates on the freedom that her job as a professor affords her to explore different ideas. She explains how she can invest lots of time thinking one idea is true and then one day decide to explore the opposite and discover that the opposite is in fact true. In a process-mindset, you could say she was wrong and wasted time and resources, but that would be reductive of the reality. The reality is that she explored a variety of ideas and with time, arrived at a valuable conclusion. That's a journey-mindset.

Let me describe one of the most productive days I've had so far. I gave myself the time to explore a bunch of related webpages and learned the more concrete definition of an abstract syntax tree, explored the implementation of a python data structure called the Element Tree, and thought about how we might begin to transform our code into data. This was a huge leap from a few weeks prior, when we were still caught up on user interactions with the IDE. It was a leap in the sense that we had moved onto a quite different approach, and it was a leap in the sense that we had made a lot of progress towards our goal. It's a matter of viewing those off-trail excursions as informing us of the way to the destination, not necessarily misleading us entirely.

Moving forward, as unfamiliar as it is for me, I'll be challenging myself to get comfortable with the unfamiliar and take advantage of the freedom that this program affords me to truly enjoy the journey.