Sunday, September 3, 2023
By:
Final week blog
And so, it has ended. My summer came to an end, and it is time to put my concluding words on to digital paper.
It was a great experience; I had the chance to meet a lot of great people and visit some exciting places.
Work:
My placement was at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I was given a project of creating an algorithm to detect and characterize two-dimensional materials. Coding has never been my strong side and I spend some time just trying to understand the problem I needed to solve. During the project progression there was multitude of things new to me and I needed to learn to apply them as fast as I could. Sometimes it was a time crunch, sometimes it was fairly easy, and sometimes I was not sure I would be able to crack the problem at hand. At the end I was able to complete the project and I am happy about it.
Non-work:
While I think one of more important aspects of the internship is the work I has done, I will be lying if I say that I lacked non-work experience during my internship. DC is a beautiful city; old buildings, lots of greens, and it is walkable! I loved it. Apart from the architecture and scenery DC has an opulence of various events going on from exotic music and art to public science lectures, everyone will find something they like. Together with other interns I enjoyed several social events during the internship. I wish I could visit DC during spring and witness cherry blossoms and visit Sakura Matsuri festival. However, I found something even better, apparently there are a LOT of national parks around DC, and since I live in Florida, where landscape consists mostly of beaches, flatlands, and swamps, I was very excited to go in an actual forests and mountains. I have made several outings to various parks (described in previous blogs) and had a time of my life enjoying nature and solitude.
Conclusion:
This was a very interesting and intense experience, I learned something about myself and acquainted with some great people, I had the time of my life.
P.S.
I want to thank entirety of Society of Physics Students and American Institute of Physics for organizing this wonderful experience, I can not adequately put in writing how big of a deal this internship was to me and how I am grateful to you all for it.
The End.
Daniil Ivannikov