Day 4 at NTOU

Today is the fourth day of my internship here at NTOU, and I haven't done anything at all. I've been getting into the research lab at around 9:30 everyday and do my own thing on the computer and chat with the grad students. So far, every time I went to find my professor in his office he's never there. I've only seen him twice this entire week. Through talking with other interns here at NTOU, and other places in Taiwan, all the internships are very relaxed and doesn't require much effort. A lot of professors encourage their interns to go out and see different places in Taiwan. My friend at Taichung got tickets to a museum from his professor. 

Yesterday I asked a grad student to show me some of the projects he's been doing. The project he showed me is for first-year Masters students. NTOU works with the local hospital and receives periodic recordings of patients talking, and the goal is to conduct a speech analysis to determine if the patients' speech skills has improved over a period of time. It's an ongoing project and NTOU reports its' results back to the hospital every few months. To get me more familiar with the project, the grad student first gave me a few pages of paper to read about the four standards NTOU uses to conduct the analysis: pitch variation, average frequency, noise-harmonic ratio, and jitter. I haven't seen how they actually work on the project yet, but I know it involves MATLAB and simple programming on MATLAB. Hopefully I can work on this project over the summer and brush up my MATLAB skills. In a week and a half there will be a summer camp for underprivileged elementary school students here on campus. I'll be helping out with that and it should keep me pretty occupied for that week at least.  

So I started my workout plan yesterday: swimming in the morning and gym at night. Yesterday morning I swam 2000 long course meters and felt super exhausted afterwards. After work, the grad students and I played badminton for a bit and went to the gym. It's actually really nice here and they have all sorts of equipment. It feels nice to workout again, except I feel so weak not being able to lift the same amount of weight as before. This morning I swam another 2000 meters and plan on going to the gym later at night. Seven weeks to get myself back in shape. 

Happy me after my morning swim.