Sunday, June 30, 2024
By:
Hello everyone!
Overall this was another great week! On Monday I finished Deborah's profile. Midhat was on a vacation, so I had to just sit on it for a few days, but soon I'd ask her to review it. I also worked with Maia and SPS to finalize the Goddard tour! I think we are going to be able to see a lot of extremely intersting things that wouldn't usualy be on a normal tour.
Tuesday morning I woke up and went to the gym with Maia. I wanted to work out legs, but the gym in the ACP building doesn't have a barbell so I had to break out of my routine and try some different dumbell exercises. That day at work I did a lot of work on Colonel John Dirk's profile. After that, I got to interview Jan Kleinert, Director of Research at ESI. We had a great conversation and I think his profile will halp a lot of people that are looking to leave academia for an industry job. After work that day 8 of us went to a bar a few metro stops away for a free trivia night. It was super fun and after we got there we learned that the second round was going to be Shrek themed! A bunch of us had just watched the movie together so we thought that it would go pretty well. We ended up in third after the first general round, but then after the Shrek round we were midway thtough the 20 or so teams. While we definitly didn't win, I think we did way better than I was expecting us to.
On Wednesday morning I wanted to go to the gym again, but I decided that sleep was more important at the time, especailly because I was already sore from all of the new leg exercises the day before. During the day I worked more on Colonel Dirk's profile and had a meeting with Midhat about if there were any people at APS that she could help introduce me to. Midhat also works with a group in APS called the Communnity Mentoring (CM) Fellows who work with students or early career physicists to help progress their careers. She asked me to look through that list of people too to see if I wanted to meet with any of them. Then that afternoon there was a CM Fellows meeting and while I didnt' participate in the meeting I got to see what goes on behind the scene which was super interesting.
Thursday was filled with more time going through John's interview and synthesizing the core points into his profile. Later that day I had a meeting with Denise about how we could use the meetings with the people I'm interviewing to make short clips for APS social media accounts. That night Zahra, someone I reached out to a few weeks ago, got back to me about having a meeting which is very exciting. Then that night I ran to Trader Joe's for some groceries and went to the GW gm right before it closed.
On Friday I had our first SPS Check-In meeting to make sure that everything was going well and that we would have enough work done by the end of the summer to be able to present. Those of us interns that work for APS were all invited to a virtual lunch with some of the other APS staff and were given a giftcard to buy lunch. That was a great time. It was fun to talk to the people I have meetings with about more informal topics like the rats in DC and where we like to go get food. After work Amanda brought Reidyn and I to her climbing gym to try some bouldering, something that she really enjoys. Reidyn and I had a great time and were really considering getting a membership because of how fun it was. The only issue is that because the gym was so nice, the membership price is higher than I'd like to pay. After we were done climbing, we went to the Kenedy Center to see an outdoor showing of Ratatouille. It was a very nice way to end the day.
Satuday morning Charlotte, Kaden, and I wento for a quick run to Theodore Roosevelt Island to start the day. Then I ran a few errands with Kaden and went back to the dorms. After that a lot of my day was spent relaxing and doing economics homework.
Sunday was a much more full day. We left for Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland. We started by going to the water falls that the park is named after, which were amazing and then we went to a beach on a lake in the park. Just as we got to the lake, Muji fell on some uneven ground and really messed up his ankle. Ironically enough, he fell right by a group of people that happened to have a Pediatrist among them. Muji decided that to play it safe he should go to the hospital to get it checked out. A couple of us helped Muji get to the ER of the closest hospital and we had one of the quickest easiest ER visits ever. As soon as we got there, they have Muji a wheelchair and then started taking his infomration down. Then as soon as they had the info they needed they took us straight to a room. Once we were in the room we had a few different people come in and help Muji, every single one was fast, efficient, and happy to be helping. We were out of the ER with a brace for Muji's ankle and confirmation that no bones were broken within around an hour to an hour and a half. We drove back to the lake and picke d the rest of the group up and went back to the dorms. While the second half of the day didn't go as I expected, I had a great time hanging out with Muji and Jaden's friend Chris at the ER. Then when I got back I was going to finish my economics homework, but the due date had suddenly changed to a time that wasn't even during this semester so I couldn't do any work. I sent the professor an email and still haven't heard anything back, but hopefully it all gets sorted out. Because I now couldn't do the work I thought I could I decide to joing some of the other interns in Jaden's room to watch Cars.
While some days didn't go as expected, we all made the most of the week and had a good time!
Charles Wszalek