Each year, Penn State New Kensington holds their Research and Student Engagement Expo where Penn State students like myself get to present their research findings to faculty and other students. Despite being held virtually as a consequence of the Pandemic, all of us seemed to persevere and come through with some really interesting projects and topics. You can find the main page for all of the projects here.
As a Sophomore in the Penn State New Kensington Honors Program, this was my year to participate! After going back and forth for a while trying to decide what I wanted to research, I decided to do a more information based research poster on blockchain technology. If that sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, you can find my poster’s Adobe Spark page here.
While I won’t go into detail in this post about the content of my research, I wanted to mainly talk about the procurement of it and how I went about doing my research. As, in this case, my research wasn’t actually conducting research, but rather just culminating information and learning.
At the bottom of my poster’s Spark Page, I provided a huge list of links to YouTube videos and Medium articles for further reference. These resources were the lifeline for my baseline understanding and guided me to other information that I wouldn’t have thought to check out otherwise. It was in this way that I could slowly break through the abstractions of the various facets and fundamentals of blockchain technology and actually understand how it works at a technical level.
Additionally, as a Penn State Student, I had the unique opportunity to participate in weekly instructional lectures from Penn State’s Blockchain@PSU club. These lectures were awesome, as they gave me a chance to either
- Affirm what I was learning online or
- Understand what I was missing or rethink something I misunderstood
Plus, the kind students who did the presentations even let us grill them with questions afterwards to help us understand further. It was a really great chance to interact with others and learn all the while.
What came out of all this time reading and taking notes? Well, had I built my portfolio out earlier, perhaps I too could have written up detailed Medium Like posts for each blockchain concept I grasped. However, building a tangible proof of my understanding was less important to me at the time than the actual goal of my work for the research expo. That was: I wanted to construct a poster that contained enough information in a digestable manner so that people could actually learn from it.
Initially, I didn’t realize that’s what I would be working towards. Yet, it ended up working out I did a boatload of research to bolster my understanding, as it ultimately helped me present it more clearly and coherently. I think the Albert Einstein Quote goes something like:
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
I like to think that’s the way I strive to learn in general; if I can’t talk myself through it simply/coherently, then I better go back and figure it out. Regardless, I figured this would serve as a good way to preface my Blockchain Research poster and to provide some insight into what went into it.
Though most of this post was just me rambling, this knowledge of blockchain technology has proven very practical in the past few months with the popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs blowing up. It’s cool to have some idea of what’s going on behind the scenes and to make informed investment decisions! Plus, I now know just a little bit more about the Chia Network I’m participating in.