Sunday, June 16, 2024
By:
With each day in D.C., I learn even more about what the city offers. This week was packed with adventures throughout the city and made me even more eager to keep exploring. Fortunately, Jaden goes to George Washington University, so he shares a lot of things to do in the city in our group chat. Which gives us a lot of options, and quite a few messages to sort through, but it’s incredible to see how much there is to do here and how easy the city makes it for people to experience what it has to offer.
One of these events that Jaden shared was free nights on Tuesdays at a comedy club. Since it was free, we had to check it out. Overall, it was a super fun time getting to just sit and laugh for a bit. On top of that, we visited the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden for their Friday night jazz concerts. It may have been packed and hard to hear the band, although it was an experience hearing Santeria by Sublime played by a jazz band, but it was a great time to sit and talk with the other interns on the painfully wet grass.
Now Saturday, we ventured out to explore a street festival in the area. However, once we walked up and were greeted by a fence, our hopes that the festival would be free were hurting. Then we were crushed at the gate when asked to buy tickets. Being conveniently next to the National Gallery of Art (which is free), we changed course and explored the museum. Following which was thrifting and shopping, regretfully I had no luck thrifting but it’s always fun to go out and see what you can find.
Finally, for what is one of my favorite parts of this internship, my work at NIST. This past week, I spent a lot of time learning the process for making our OLED devices. Turns out this is a very involved, two-day process that involves a lot of careful handling and cleaning. However, it is such a cool thing to make. Learning to use all the different equipment involved alone was awesome, and then learning how to stack layers of materials on the nanoscale was incredible. With all the excitement though I think I may have been a little too rough on them, since my first batch failed to light up ever. However, I’ve learned from my mistakes (hopefully), and have new batch nearly done and they seem to be in better shape than the previous ones. As in better shape, I mean one out of two that I’ve tested work, so at this point I feel like LEDs shouldn’t have to light up to actually be called functional but physics seems to disagree with me on that one.
Kaden Gammon