Week 1: June 1- June 7
Last week I met with my peer advisor, Dr. Emerald Christopher, to determine a time for our weekly check-ins, review my layout's foundation, and sort out the logistics of how and when I will be running my tests. By giving her an overview of my goals for this project, Dr. Christopher was able to expand my current research structure and give me ideas to further enrich the data. Additionally, Professor Christopher was extremely helpful in helping synthesize and process what documents and training I need to get IRB approval.

With the groundwork laid, I officially started my testing on ChatGPT this Monday, where I focus on Part 1 of my project on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Part 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, Monday was not as smooth sailing as I imagined. First, I created 2 new ChatGPT accounts, one using the free plan and the other with the premium subscription, so I could measure the different servers' responses to my questions. However, I quickly discovered that the free version of ChatGPT limits how many entries you can type in per hour, which really slowed down my progress. It was also a learning curve to discover which way to implement my questions so that they would be simplistic, efficient, and effective for my research project. Although Monday was messy and a bit frustrating, in the end I was able to solidify the structure for implementing my testing on ChatGPT.

Regarding my IRB process, Dr. Christopher informed me that I needed to complete the Group 2 Citi Training before submitting my proposal to the IRB board. So I created a CITI account and completed the modules associated with this training. With my lack of conducting research, I did not realize how extensive research guidelines were, so being exposed to this information was very enlightening.

Week 2: June 8- June 14
During the second week, I continued with my scheduled testing on ChatGPT. It has definitely become a smoother process and more manageable to plug in the prompts, and I am slowly implementing the data into my big spreadsheet. Even though I did play around with ChatGPT when creating my application for Laidlaw and I had some expectations for what I would discover, I have already found many new results and have a lot of data and trends to work with. This has motivated me to push through the long hours of testing, and I am excited to look at all the data at the end. 

However, the biggest challenge for this week is tackling the IRB paperwork. Though the amount of documents is not a lot, it has sometimes been a bit hard to understand how to respond to certain questions. The part that brought the most challenge to me, however, was the consent process. Since I plan to conduct my interviews online, I needed to request a waiver to use an alternate way to obtain consent. However, I was not sure where to find this request. Thankfully, fellow Laidlaw scholar Alex Zuehlke informed me that the IRB holds virtual office hours twice a week, and I was able to directly ask my questions to a member of Georgetown's IRB board. With my question answered, I have finished filling out my paperwork. I am just waiting for my peer mentor to review it, and I hope to have it submitted by the end of this week.
Besides my goal to submit my IRB application, I also hope to read more about the intersections of Gender, Language, and AI. My peer mentor has already provided me with some foundational texts, and I hope to discover more as I read them.
Have a good week everyone!