Jess and I found out yesterday (unofficially) that we have been approved by IRB. All we have to do now is wait for our official signature page and we are good to go. With that said, we have been working on other aspects of the project and trying to get other things in line to work on. We also started scheduling interviews with people as soon as we found out that we got IRB approval. It has been crazy here, for sure. With tests, trying to figure out this project, and all the other homework assignments, we have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Nonetheless, we are trying really hard to get all of our tasks completed for our first milestone. We have reached out to a few students to ask if they wanted their research displayed, but I have not heard back from anyone as of yet. We also haven’t found as many student research projects as we thought there were around campus- then again, not everyone publishes their findings on posters for everyone to see. We are thinking of reaching out to faculty advisers from other departments to see if they know of anyone who has conducted the type of research we are interested in and if they might want it published to our website. Overall, we are slowly chipping away at our to-do lists.

This week there was a presentation advertised on campus that Jess and I were super interested in going to. Unfortunately, our schedules don’t always coincide and Jess was unable to come. Nonetheless, I went to the presentation on Thursday. The title suggested that it would be of use to us- as it had to do with fracking- however the presentation was not quite what we had hoped it would be. Indeed, the man presenting was from the PA Department of Environmental Protection and the presentation had to do with well sites, but mostly he was debuting a new app for inspection purposes. The information I did gather that wasn’t about the app was interesting, but I am not sure how much of it we can actually use on the website. I’m glad I attended the presentation, but I think the books we checked out from the library are still our best bet at finding information on fracking.