Friday, July 6, 2018
By:
Sadly we are halfway through the summer internship. However this week was really productive. My mentor came back from being away for two weeks. Monday we had a nice long meeting to go over everything I had been working on. I am super happy to report that he was very pleased! It felt awesome that he realized I was able to handle myself and keep myself busy without him here. Still, now that he has come back we have been very busy. This week we spent some time in the lab calibrating our system. Now what that entails is, is finding a waveguide/transmission line to serve as our standard reference model. Now all a transmission or waveguide really is a 1 dimensional conductive path for microwave signals to travel through. I also spent some time utilizing the Vector network analyzer, which is the apparatus that generates and receives signals. That process took up about a day in total and so after that I processed some of the data and we looked over some of the trends.
There are a couple of other interns here in the lab and they are biology students, but it turns out our projects are connected. They are looking at certain lipids and molecules, while I analyze the data that returns the RLGC values of the given material. It has been really awesome to find out that my project has various applications. That being said, I have been working on a code to look at multiple data files at once since there is a lot of old data to look at and a lot of new data to come. So to make the analysis smoother, I am working on a code that automates much of the “boring stuff”, like inputting and outputting things manually. Believe it or not that took up the majority of the day friday. However I was able to get it to work right around 6pm before catching the last metro! Come Monday morning I will just clean it up a bit.
Aside from NIST, life outside work has been hot. Very very hot and humid. Sunday was an adventure, making our way to ALDI. My roommate and I took the metro and walked a couple of miles to buy cauliflower for less than two dollars.(Definitely make the trip with your roommate.) But in all honesty ALDI is a grocery store where you can buy twice the food for half the price.
Also we were able to celebrate some birthdays and a before leaving we also catched some time at the pool. We got the 4th of July off and so we all got to sleep in and have lunch with Brad that day. This upcoming weekend I will be watching some of the world cup games and taking the GRE on Saturday. Hopefully I can also catch a movie.
(Pictures to be uploaded soon)
Jesus Perez