While this was a weird week for me, since my senior project largely revolves around the LREI schedule and school was closed on Thursday and Friday, I was still able to get a decent amount of work done. I have done a lot of research over this week, and already I have been able to learn about a lot of the fundamentals of how lasers work. An example of this is how, purely technically speaking, there is no such thing as a laser cutter. Cutting lasers actually don’t cut anything, like how scissors do. Rather, they vaporize the material they interact with, imparting enough energy on the material the laser is cutting to cause a phase change, from solid to gas/vapor. Learning this was helped by my new learning strategy gained through teaching, which is to always start at the most basic level and gradually work my way more complicated rather than diving right into the main thing I’m trying to learn. I’ve also been applying this to my sustainable energy class, specifically in my research for our Three Gorges Dam project. My group was tasked with examining the social impacts of the dam, and based on what we found we had to determine if the construction of the dam was a good thing or not. Before diving into the broader social impacts of the dam, I started at the base level, in this case the concrete and objective facts of the dam, such as the fact that 1.2 million people were forcibly resettled. This new strategy has been helping my learning a lot in these past two weeks, and I’m eager to develop it further, and learn more strategies, throughout the rest of my senior project experience!