Sunday, June 18, 2023
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Hello all, and welcome back to another blog post.
This was the first week where I started with the hands-on part of my research. I also finally got my badge. This is very nice because now I don’t technically have to be escorted everywhere, even though my mentor didn’t care about that rule on the second day of my internship. I can get in my building now, which means I can show up whenever I want, and I don’t need my mentor to be there. As I mentioned, I got to work hands-on for the first time. Although because it was my first time, I wasn’t allowed to do much. However, it’s nice not to be stuck in an office for an entire day. The first picture attached to the bottom of the blog is my experimental setup for generating and measuring entangled photons. The only downside is the way the data collection works. Each trial takes 20-25 minutes, and because we are essentially measuring light sensitivity, we have to keep all the lights off in the room. So I sat in the dark for hours on end on Tuesday.
Other NIST things include very spotty WI-FI this week, which didn’t work at all on Friday, and I still cannot sign on to the laptop that NIST gave me to use because my ID doesn’t have the necessary security features. I need to get an exemption from those measures, but the exemption hasn’t worked thus far. That means I spent my entire Thursday afternoon on the phone with IT trying to figure it out. We have a short-term fix but no long-term one as of right now.
As for my week outside of work, the week started off great when Denver beat Miami in game five of the NBA finals to win the championship. I bought a T-shirt that night before I went to bed just to ensure I could get in a reasonable amount of time. The middle of the week was sort of uneventful. Not much outside of work, but I went to the gym every day.
On Thursday after work, we had a dinner/social event that I was almost late to because of bad delays on the metro. However, I made it there just before it started. After we got back to the dorms that night, some of us went out to Captain Cookie, which was quite tasty. Friday, there was a large group of us planning on going to Jazz in the Garden again; however, it was canceled due to the weather forecast. Even though it barely rained on Friday. Saturday was pretty low-key for the first half of the day. We got to attend the National Orchestral Institute performance on the University of Maryland campus. We almost didn’t make it there, though, because we suspected that our driver was under the influence of something as he was slurring his words and straight up ran a stop sign. We survived. The event was great; we got food before the event and got to listen to amazing musicians for the night (attached below). And today, Sunday, a bunch of the interns went to the Georgetown flea market. There was some pretty neat stuff at the flea market, but I only bought a few trading cards, which worked out well.
That’s all for this week; I hope y’all can catch the next installment in a week.
Clayton Markech