The main part of what I had to do in the very first week was the IDL tutorial taught by Suman everyday. I was expecting IDL to be more similar to Matlab than it actually was, but it wasn't too similar. In addition to learning to code in IDL, I also had to deal with the issues with using ssh and sftp, which sometimes made it difficult to keep up with the lecture.
For my project, since Chunming will not be on campus Mondays through Wednesdays every week, I was told to read papers and learn about solar flares and CMEs. I especially focused on the paper by Klimchuk, Patsourakos, and Cargill from 2008, which describes the calculations of flare energies. After meeting Chunming on Thursday and learning about flares and CMEs and the basic steps of energy calculations, I ran an example code that runs EBTEL on one flare loop. Plots generated by it is pasted below. I spent a lot of time making sense of the code and adding questions on the code as comments which I asked on the second meeting.
Since it was the very first progress report meeting we had, I had not prepared any slides.