Research Assistant Review

I mainly programmed VR projects for PhD students by listening to their requirements and creating a product that can be used for their research. A typical day would be designing, coding or testing the project based on how far it has progressed. There would be weekly general lab meetings, and other times I'd meet with individual members to discuss the projects. I'd also sometimes helped with general Psychology work such as testing participants.

The placement developed my coding skills, in particular my knowledge of C#. It also introduced me to Unity and gave me a decent understanding of the software. Involvement in all aspects of the project helped to improve my skills and experience in software development as a whole. Attending weekly meetings, helped develop my people skills.

Overall yes. I think I was given a decent amount of responsibility. I was working on projects unsupervised for the majority of the time, and I was trusted with experiment participants. However, only a few of the projects I worked on would have actually had a major negative impact if I mishandled them. Most of my projects probably could've been made by other lab members, and any that couldn't weren't time sensitive.

I recieved a good amount of support and guidance. For the Computer Science side of the placement, I was given an introduction to Unity by the lab members and if I ever had any questions I knew I could easily contact them for help. For the Psychology side, as I had no prior knowledge of any of it I was given lots of guidance and support of how to deal with participants etc.

It was a very positive atmosphere. All the lab members got along well, and were good friends. The majority of the lab meetings would be in a pub, and most of us would voluntarily stay after work hours to catch up.

I enjoyed my placement a lot. I met a lot of friendly people. I developed a lot of useful skills such as Unity, which I wouldn't have had an opportunity to learn otherwise. Improving my C# skills will also definitely prove helpful as I am a stronger programmer now than I was before the placement. However, I would've rather had less Psychology related responsibilities. As that reduced time to develop relevant skills.

Yes

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