I can’t beleive how fast this summer has gone! Not only have I been working hard alongside an amazing Ph.D. mentor, Professor, and other REU students to complete my research tasks, but we all worked togther through a pandemic! Covid-19 has affected my daily life since March of 2020, and this summer has been no exception. Working completly remotly has come with its own unique set of challenges, however I have also had covid scares. I have been directly exposed to covid a few times, and with a weak immune system I was very nervous about the outcome. Thankfully, with being full vaccinated, I did not contract it this summer, but it was something I was worying about it alongside my continued learning experince of academic research.

I continued workinf on assigned portions of the 2FA overleaf paper. We also started working on analyzing the data we have.

OverLeaf for the 2FA study has become something that we have begun utilizing extensively. We had a two-and-a-half-hour meeting this week where we discussed the data that we had with Professor Camp, myself, and the two Ph.D. students on the project. Prior to the actual meeting starting, and the two Ph.D. students and I were able to talk freely, where they both gave me advice about starting graduate school and some tips on how to prepare for it this summer. We have discussed deadlines for the paper, along with how we would like to analyze the data further in order to make it most useful.

During this week I transcribed interviews. Jacob, the Ph.D. mentor I work with/under, is conducting interviews weekly with participants that I later transcribe. I also got to go to the IoT house, where both Jacob and Prof. L Jean Camp, work for the first time. Because of COVID-19 restrictions on the Indiana University-Bloomington campus, I had not been able to access the building or work out of it, even during the school year. I was excited to explore the house. I was able to sit in the house, transcribe, and was given the opportunity to meet the participants, while being covid safe, from the study to pay them for completing the weekly interviews.

This week I was very productive on the project. I did a small literary review to add to my personal background knowledge of the topic space, as well as be able to reference these against our findings.

I am ending my fifth week and starting my sixth week, meaning I am at the halfway mark of the DREU program. Because I have worked with my mentor prior to starting the program, and am attending graduate school in August with them, I plan to continue working with them after the program ends. Also, the project I am working on is qualitative research and includes participants that are involved in weekly interviews and other tasks which could require us to not have all the data ready and analyzed by the time the program ends. The research work will still be a work in progress.

During my fourth week with the lab I have completed IRB Citi training and have obtained Social/Behavioral Researchers certification! I learned a lot about intereacting with participants in a study as well as how to handel participants data. It was not all relavint to the study I am currently involved with, however I believe the information is usefull and will come in handy in future studies.

Time is already flying by! My third week has completed and it is my last week of getting used to the project material and applications. I have started created preliminary graphs on R. This has allowed me to get used to utilizing R and R Studio to analyze data and focus on making graphs. There was an emphases on making the graphs accessible to those with lower vision and increasing chart visibility to use later on posters or papers. I have never used a statistical programing language like R before. In my undergraduate program we mostly focused on Python, or making things web accessible and using HTML, PHP, and others of that nature. Learning R was a bit of a learning curve but I am happy to work on expanding my programming skill set. I also had the opportunity to read more about the project topic space. I read “How Mandatory Second Factor Affects the Authentication User Experience” by Jacob Abbott and Sameer Patil; as you can tell from the title this paper focused on how 2FA has effected individuals experience with their login experience. Our study focuses on the same topic space, though we are coming at it from a different angle.

My second week included learning more about Professor Camp’s lab, attending more lab meetings and one-on-one meetings with Jacob Abbott. I read studies that have already been done on two-factor authentication, familiarizing myself with the content in which I will be involved with. I also spend time creating this website.

During my first week I attended orientation for the DREU experience where participants were shown their overall milestones to complete this summer as well as a short summary of what research is. There was a verying level of experince for each of the participants, but it was a nice way for us all to “meet” each other during this virtual experience. My first week also included a lab meeting with Professor L. Jean Camp, my Ph.D. mentor Jacob Abbott, and other Ph.D. students in Professor Camp’s lab. I was able to learn about the expectations for this summer, about my project, and about other project updates happening in the lab. I also had a one on one meeting with Abbott where we went into further discussion about the project.