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    Can you believe it's the end of March already? It blows my mind how fast this month has gone by. During my time in Wales, it has been a strange mix of time crawling and flying but I have to say that this month has in no way crawled.

In the last week, I have become acutely aware of how little time is left in this semester. People have flights booked to go home permanently that are only 2 months away. That's enough on it's own to feel the pressure, but when 3 weeks of that time is Easter/spring break and then a couple other weeks of it are part of the exam period it starts to feel like we're on an express train headed straight to the end of the semester.

While that's kind of the upside of time speeding by, the "acutely aware of how little time is left" thing starts to lead to panic attacks when I think about all the stuff that is supposed to happen between now and mid May. There's a 4000 word assignment, completion of a project which has seemed to evolve into something much larger than expected, a final report on said project, a presentation on the project, and two final exams. For that project, we're somehow crazy enough to be attempting to conduct numerous interviews, up to 6 focus groups, a large-scale questionnaire, and I'm doing heat-mapping. And then we have to analyze it all. I'm not sure when we're going to do it all or why we thought this was a good idea. To throw in some positivity though, we have actually already conducted one focus group, so I guess we're on the right track.

Oh, and did I mention my thesis? Now that we're months behind our original prescription for our timeline of events (who didn't see that one happening?) we've finally got our experiment program working and our study active on the SONA participant panel as of Friday. Diego helped us out this weekend by acting as our guinea pig: he is the original participant. As of this evening, including Diego, we've already run 13 participants!!! It has definitely exceeded my expectations for how many people we could get to sign up or how quickly. Our goal is 120 people total, though we are anticipating having to settle for fewer. All things considered, two days into running our experiment we're 10% of the way there. That's pretty awesome. If we keep getting sign-ups at this rate, we should be set. The 3 week break and then heading into exams is going to make things tricky, but here's hoping!

So many sign-ups! (non-clickable so names aren't legible)

So things are cracking along for sure. Hopefully the next week and a half will be just as busy and productive before I come HOME! :)