Six weeks in, my summer has mostly followed the shape I imagined back in June, though not without some bumps along the way. I stayed on track with building out my interview questions and reaching out to childcare programs across the city, but I underestimated how genuinely hard it would be to actually get interviews scheduled. Teachers are stretched thin, and parents are juggling their own version of that same chaos, so a lot of my early weeks were less about conducting interviews and more about just trying to find a window that worked for someone. I started treating every reschedule as a normal part of the process instead of a setback, which honestly changed how I approached the whole summer.

If I'm being honest, I wish I had started that outreach even earlier while I was waiting for my IRB to be approved, just to give myself more breathing room. But the slower pace ended up being useful too. It gave me more time to sit with my questions and think harder about what I actually wanted to learn from parents and teachers, rather than rushing into interviews with a half-formed sense of what I was listening for.

My relationship with my mentor has also deepened since the beginning of the summer. In June, our meetings were mostly logistical, figuring out which centers to approach and how to frame my questions. Now our conversations go somewhere else entirely. We talk through specific phrases parents use during reunions, what "be a big kid" might actually be teaching a child, and how those small moments of language add up over time. We've even begun brainstorming new research topic ideas!

Right now I'm sitting with my interview transcripts trying to figure out how qualitative coding actually works in practice, not just in theory. That's the piece I need to nail down before September 1, along with finishing transcription and starting to shape everything into an actual paper. But I'm excited to get started!