SCOPE Week 26: Last SCOPE Wednesday

SCOPE isn't ending quite yet, but today was our last SCOPE Wednesday. Our final reports and our posters (one archival, two for SCOPE Summit) are due Friday, my team's presentation to our sponsor is on May 9th, and then SCOPE Summit is on May 10th.

We had some data analysis to finish up today still, and we put in an enormous amount of work on the report. There are still a few figures to add and a couple of paragraphs to write, and our report will come out to be around 80 pages of non-code material, plus a lot of code, raw and processed data, and a user guide for our user interface.

Even though SCOPE won't officially end for another two or so weeks, we're pretty much done; everything after this week is just talking about our work. I'll be posting a reflection on the full year once all of that is over. Right now, it's a relief to be so close to done. Do I wish we'd been able to do more technical work? Absolutely. If we'd had an additional month with the data, I think we would have had time to figure out what causes some of the discrepancies between our models and the data. But as it is, we can qualitatively (and in some cases quantitatively) say what's going on pretty well.

I'm happy with our report, and I glowed a little bit when our faculty advisor told us that our second draft was "overall really good." Our liaisons also seem happy with how far we got, though we'll see more about how Boston Scientific responds when we go there to present.

Goodnight git, goodnight stents,
Goodnight data discontent.
Goodnight model, goodnight slope,
Goodnight Wednesday, goodnight SCOPE.

SCOPE Week 25: Old SCOPE Supplies

Someone did some clean-up/reorganizing at Olin recently and found several boxes of old SCOPE things, so Rebecca, the SCOPE Director, brought the boxes around to the relevant teams. The BoSci materials that were found were marked "STENTS" and consisted of two long tubes in plastic bags.

When Rebecca came by, she said, "I brought you more stents!" assuming that something marked with "STENTS" would contain stents. We pulled the plastic wrap off and looked inside the two tubes and were disappointed to find them empty, at which point we realized there was something wrapped around the tubes, and maybe that was the important part.

It was a diffracting white sheet of some kind of polymer. We're not really sure what it was for, but we had fun throwing it around to watch it float, wearing it as a cape, and making it do diffraction-y things. We also think we know which BoSci project it was from. One year, BoSci sponsored multiple projects, and so the teams were identified by general topics, polymers and stents. We believe the tube was marked "STENTS" because it was for the Stents Team.

SCOPE Stories 24: Graphing and Goals

I looked at one of my teammates today and said, "I feel like I've been doing the same thing for the past three weeks."

"Graphing?"

"Graphing."

We got eight more stents worth of data today (and still might get a few more). We also got updated information on stents whose data we'd sorted through last week. It turns out that some of the parameter values we were given were target values, not actual ones, and the actual values were quite different. So today was a day of redoing some of our previous data analysis, doing new data analysis, and trying to draw conclusions so that we can write the report.

Not all of the models are going to be in a great place at the end, but at this point the hope is that we'll be able to diagnose ways in which they're wrong. If we can say that Model B is making incorrect predictions for a certain quantity because of too strong a dependence on a particular parameter, then we'll be in an okay place. It would be even better to be able to come up with a list of dependencies (essentially power laws or something similar) so that someone else would have a better place to start in developing a model.

SCOPE Stories Week 23: A Very Long Stent

At one point today, Abe was very frustrated with his model and spent a long time trying to talk through the theory of it with Brian. About an hour later, he started laughing uncontrollably. It turned out that instead of modeling a 7.5 cm stent, he was modeling a 75 cm stent.

We have more data! Some of it's a bit weird, though, so we're still sorting through it. The hope is that we'll be in a good place with the data and the models by the end of Sunday.

Four Years of Curriculum Changes

I recently posted about the changes to the first year curriculum while I've been at Olin. There have been a number of other key curriculum changes over the course of my four years here, though, and I wanted to discuss those as well.

SCOPE Stories Week 22.5: Wait, the Models are Working?

This past Wednesday, I was really frustrated about having errors in our models and not knowing how to proceed. We redid some of our testing and analysis, though, and we're actually in much better shape than we expected. Our models are behaving and matching data pretty closely, and where they're not, we've figured out how to fix them.

We haven't gotten to check all of our models yet, but we're getting a lot closer, and I'm feeling a lot better about what we're going to be able to deliver to Boston Scientific at the end.

We have a weekly Sunday meeting, and I was kind of dreading it today because I was so unhappy with the state of the models. But this meeting turned out to be quite exciting!