My first week at Northeastern University consisted mainly of onboarding tasks and starting back up from where I left off with my project last summer. Since I conducted research with Dr. Megan Hofmann last summer through the DREU progran, I didnt have to do quite as many onboarding tasks. However this year, her lab, the ACT lab, is in the brand new EXP building on campus so I had to do some extra trainings to have access to the lab space. On Monday I was remote and worked on the said trainings to gain lab access and completed other miscellaneous onboarding tasks. In the evening, I explored the neighborhood I’m living in this summer and settled into my sublease.

On Tuesday, I was in person at the EXP building. I started the day by getting a tour of the new building and lab space from Dr. Hofmann which was incredible! After I went to my favorite coffe shop near campus (Render Coffee) where I mainly focused on refamilirizing myself with KnitScript and catching back up on where I left off with my project last year since I’ll be finishing it this summer. At end the day, I had my first advising meeting of the summer with Dr. Hofmann where we discussed the project plan for the summer.

On Wednesday, I was in person again and got trained on the knitting machine in the ACT Lab. After that, I began knitting some of the samples that I wrote code for last summer that I was unable to knit due to the machine at MIT that we were using being broken. I really enjoyed being able to finally create these samples on the machine.

On Thursday, I was in person and spent most of the day working on writing code for a new knit sample usingthe Brick stitch pattern. This helped me get back into writing code in KnitScript and further helped me familiarize myself with the knitting machine and knitpaint software that we use to create the files the knitting machine uses to create the samples. We also had a full lab meeting which I really enjoyed as I got to see my friends who I worked with in the ACT lab last summer. After the meeting, I finished up the Brick stitch code and successfully created the sample on the machine!

On Friday, I worked partly remote and in person. I began the day by writing this post and updating my DREU site at a new coffee shop that i wanted to try (Render is still superior). Then I began working on fixing an issue with the code for a sample that creates a 3D cylinder on the knitting machine which didn’t turn out as expected when I tried knitting it. Then to end the day, I went in to Northeastern and worked on creating samples on the knitting machine.