A week before my research officially started, my supervisor shared the dataset with me. Having a look at the dataset, I had completely no idea what the variables were, and how to even start data exploration. After the first meeting with my supervisor and other students on the research team (which I did not expect), in which everyone kept asking each other questions, I started to understand the research background and know terms like "RevEDF". In the research team that I am a part of, everyone has a different research topic. For example, one of my colleagues researched how blood oximetry differs under fetal growth restriction (FGR) and another colleague researched how FGR-fetuses' cognitive scores differ as they grow up. Even though our research topics are quite different, when combined, they make holistic research about FGR, which my supervisor would like to apply to her research on brain injury. 

During my second week of research, I travelled to the Imperial Silwood campus with my supervisor to meet my secondary supervisor (the only person specialising in researching “scaling theory” that my supervisor is interested in) and his research team. On that day, I attended my supervisor’s seminar about her research and observed how she presented her research to graduate students logically. I also observed and joined the conversation between my two supervisors, and I was fascinated by how they criticized each other’s ideas and refined them into better statements.  

Throughout the rest of my research period, I kept doing data analysis, presenting my up-to-date research findings to the research team (as well as listening to others’ presentations), receiving feedback, and refining research directions. Through this process, I learned how to present a bunch of information in a simple, straightforward way. In fact, I did a lot of data analysis and found many “plausible” explanations to the observations that I found interesting and would like to share. However, the “too-much” information made my presentation complex and difficult to understand. During the final week, my supervisor suggested that I should only present the significant results and condense the presentation into 10~15 slides. By doing so, my colleagues understood my research findings easily and I could tell from the questions they asked.  

From this summer research, I developed my data analysis and communications/presentation skills. More importantly, I understand why research is usually done in teams and see why researchers review each other’s work and give each other constructive feedback. Because everyone has different research interests and specialties, working together allows the research to be more holistic and thus have broader applications.