Thank you for your comment. Having feedback is a very important way to assess yourself in many aspects of learning. It is a useful step into gauging the progress you personally think you may have made. It is useful to surround yourself, in the classroom with peers and in more professional settings with mentors and coworkers that can assess and give you feedback on your progress. This is a great component in helping you come out of your comfort zone. Of course as you said this feedback is helpful in different ways based on the situation and person, but you will find ways to make this feedback work for yourself. Thank you again.

-Amy

I think the most important part of this experience for an undergraduate really is “stepping outside the comfort zone” but only with the appropriate support (as you both said, the importance of forming that community around Amy for feedback purposes).

I had a similar experience (outside of a lab of course) which was a useful learning tool in hindsight, but was not as successful because of the fact that feedback was minimal (felt like I had a blindfold on). The learning curve on my project was too steep for an undergraduate to handle without proper support/feedback; the amount I could have learned from the experience was greatly hindered by the fact that I had no way of knowing whether I was moving in the right direction and what the “right direction” was in the first place.

Thanks for blogging — interesting in reading more!

Arminé