My Practical Experience Week

by Ian Holmer

Last week our classs had practical experience week, where you get to try woking at a real job and see how everything works. I chose to work at the Humanities Lab at Lund University, or “Humlabbet” for short. I chose to work there because my sister did the same thing two years back, so we had connections to the people who worked there. Also, my dad knows the guy who is in charge of everything there. It was very fun working there, my task was setting up and using the eyetrackers. Eyetrackers are machines that tracks IR reflections of the eye, and thus telling us where the eye is looking.

   During the entire week there were some technical difficulties, a missing monitor here, and a failure in the tracking sensors there,  so the week was full of problem solving, which was fun and intresting, since I got to connect different electrical cables to different adapters, while simultaneously watching a monitor too see my progress in getting the video information back on the screen.  When I succeeded, I secured everything with duct tape, which worked almost flawlessly for the rest of the week.

   I think this would be an excellent summerjob, since the work days aren’t too long, and the job doesn’t require heavy lifting or anything physically demanding. Also, the job isn’t ties to a specific schedule, since you only work when you have test persons available to perform the experiment. This means that you can have a relaxing summer, because you don’t have to stress with the time.

   One drawback with this job is that you sometimes don’t have anything to do, except killing time. But of course, if you’re the supervisor or are actually employed, you have to look at the actual tracking data and make sence out of it, and then do a lot of paperwork and analyses, and lastly a conclusive report. 

   I would certainly work there again if I got the chance. Overall it was a great experience, and my supervisor was very happy with my contribution and help.