I started off my DREU experience with three welcome and introduction meetings spanning the first three days: a one-on-one meet with my grad mentor, a meet with the graduate students and fellow undergraduates working on computational biology projects and finally, a meeting with all DREU 2021 members and faculty. By the middle of the week, I obtained my Net ID and password which allows me remote access to the parasol lab’s computers (I am working with parasol lab). I then started my onboarding process, the zeroth module of the lab’s motion planning and probabilistic roadmaps crash course, by creating a page for myself on the lab’s website, setting up my gitlab, reading on what is expected of me for the summer. I was also added to the lab’s slack page as well as DREU’s slack and discord pages. That concluded the onboarding process and I moved on to the module 1 of the crash course which I had to read three articles, the third one on probabilistic roadmaps was a little difficult to understand but it was still fun. Thankfully, I am having a discussion on it with my grad mentor next week. The other requirement was to checkout the PMPL library (I ran the code and visualized it: I’m including a shot of how pretty it looks lol. We use vizmo for the visualization of the pmpl: Figure 1: showing the execution of a pmpl code in a 3D environment.

For the second week, I am hoping to complete the discussions for the module 1 - not required but I do them to make sure I understood the completed module - after the article discussion with my grad mentor. After which I hope to complete the second module. I am not sure how much I would actually get done though because Monday is a holiday and I am moving on Tuesday, was supposed to be this weekend but a package my brother is receiving for his internship is not coming in until Tuesday so we have to wait. I am planning on working over the weekend to make up for the lost time but hey, no promises now.