Armaan Kalkat

1st Week - My first week in Norway was full of new experiences and exciting opportunities. I landed after three flights and 17 hours and was greeted at the home of the lab director, Dr. Jason Rothman, with a wonderful dinner. The next day was my first day in the lab, where I met my supervisor Toms and got my first taste of working in the PoLaR Lab. Throughout the week, I became trained in conducting demographic interviews of participants for the project, attended a mini-conference with three invited speakers, and observed my first EEG session. Overall, while the weather in the first week was a bit more cold than I am used to from Florida, I received such a warm welcome from everyone in the lab that I was very excited to learn more and get started with conducting research in earnest. I also got to explore the town a little bit over the weekend and see a movie in a cinema built in 1916, which was super cool!

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2nd Week - My second week in Norway saw me settling into more of a routine and helping with both EEG sessions and interviews, while also getting involved in helping with a side project on Russian verbs with another researchers in the lab, Yanina. I also got to experience my first national holiday, May 17th (Constitution Day), but unfortunately the weather was very bad for being outside. Towards the end of the week the sun began to finally come out and I began to get glimpses of the fabled Tromsø summer. Finally, I enjoyed visiting three different museums (all for free as a student!) on one day, which was a fantastic way to both engage with the local culture and art and explore more of the region's history. 

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3rd Week - During my third week in Norway, I started to work more directly on the Russian project while still being involved in running both EEG and interview sessions for the EEG Cognitive Aging Project. My contributions on the Russian project include creating the experiment in Gorilla, an online research platform, which has afforded me a great learning opportunity with both this software and JavaScript which is being used to code some of the required tasks. I feel as if I am getting a huge variety of different experiences during my time here and I am certainly not left wanting more to do! During this week, I also got some training on preprocessing of EEG data which is another important skill that will undoubtedly play a role in future research I do. Finally, I was able to travel to the top of a mountain by cable car at Fjellheisen and experience the wonderful summer weather with a hike to Hillsøytoppen on the island of Sommarøy, which had some of the best views I have seen during this trip yet, although it has all been incredibly beautiful and new (especially when compared to Florida's completely flat terrain!)

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4th Week - My 4th week in Norway was full of more exciting research opportunities as well as cultural experiences. I continued to conduct interviews for the EEGCAP project and became even more confident in running EEG sessions and preprocessing data. I ran into a few problems with the Russian verb project on Gorilla based on whether we wanted to primarily use Javascript or Gorilla's experiment builder, but we were able to find a design which worked for our purposes and was not overly complex. I also took some free time to visit a local farmer's market in Tromsø and the UiT Museum, which had a fascinating exhibit on life in Northern Norway during WWII and focused on civilian experiences of the war, as well as exhibits on the northern lights and the geological characteristics of the region. 

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5th Week - My 5th week in Norway involved attending more talks by distinguished researchers in the field such as Theres Gruter from the University of Hawai'i and making more progress on my own research as well. I was even able to see the process of preliminary analysis of fMRI data from one of the other projects that my supervisor, Toms, was working on, which was really fascinating and something I would love to learn more about in the future. In terms of the Russian project, I worked this week to finish implementing the random dot motion generator which would form the basis of the experimental manipulation, and also started working on creating the lexical decision task which would form the other part of the study design, which allowed me to learn a lot more about JSPsych (a Javascript library for creating psychology experiments). In terms of fun activities, our research group went bowling, a hike back up to Fjellheisen (where I had previously taken a cable car -- this time taking 1200 stone steps up to the top!), and I visited the local water park / swimming pool facility with an Olympic sized pool. 

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6th Week - During my 6th week in Tromsø, I was asked to give a talk to the PoLaR Lab Reading Group about my ongoing research project at UF. While it was nerve-wracking to prepare the presentation which I knew would be seen by not only those in the room with me but also online by other researchers in the field, I found the actual presentation to be more thought-provoking and enlightening than anything else. I received a lot of great feedback about my project and ideas on where to go from here. As for my work in the lab, this week saw us finishing up the last of our demographic interviews and working hard to hit our goal of 40 complete participant data sets by the end of the summer semester. Yanina and I also met with the our collaborators in the Russian department on the Russian verb project to show them our progress on creating the prototype and brainstorm the exact protocol for our pilot study. This meeting was extremely interesting and I was very honored to be included as I was able to learn so much from interacting with researchers in an adjacent field who are so knowledgeable about the language they study. It was truly inspiring to see how psycholinguists and linguists from more abstract and theoretical fields can come together to test theoretical predictions and move both fields forward in their understanding. Over the weekend, I attended a death metal and jazz fusion concert in the town center which was an adrenaline-filled cultural experience to say the least, and one I will certainly not forget. 

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7th Week - My 7th and final week in Norway consisted of wrapping up the final EEG sessions of the semester, saying goodbye to everyone I had worked with and met along the way, and of course spending some last breathtaking moments in the beautiful natural surroundings of the island of Tromsø and the country of Norway as a whole. I visited my favorite part of the island, the south shore and the beautiful connected park, Telegrafbukta for a day out walking the coast. I also finally fulfilled my plan of completing a midnight sun hike (as close to the Summer solstice as I could) by hiking to the top of Vardentoppen right by my student housing past midnight to view the spectacular views of the sunset/sunrise over the mountains and water. It truly felt like the end of a wonderful adventure not only in learning so much about my own field and meeting so many excellent researchers, but also an experience I will carry with me in life more generally, about the values of traveling and experiencing a new place even with all of the difficulties which come along with that, because those once-in-a-lifetime experiences make it so worth it. As I boarded my flight out of the country and saw the small town and island I had come to call a home receding below the clouds, I was full of so many emotions. While I would miss the people I had met and the close-knit community of researchers I had been a part of, I was also so excited to bring what I had learned back to my own lab at UF and back to my own academic community. All in all, this summer marked the first time I had ever traveled internationally by myself, and I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity to learn new things, enjoy myself, and grow as a researcher and as a person.