Sunday, June 5, 2022
By:
Week 1: Welcome to DC
This week marked the start of a new chapter in my life. My very first internship while staying at the capital of the United States. Everyday has been something new over here in DC. I landed on Sunday from St. Louis and the very next day was the memorials day. Most of us met each other on our first day itself at ‘Schrodinger's consignment’ (room 907), where there were left items from previous interns and I ended up getting a lot of stuff from them. Then the next day, we all gathered for the memorial day’s parade event. It was fun to see all those marching bands and this was also my first time watching them here in the US.
Next day was the orientation day at ACP (American Center for Physics) and we met with all other board members from the SPS. They had a spaghetti tower challenge and we (I, Justin and Taylor) won it. Actually, it was a tie between us and Valeria’s team and my boy Justin was lucky to win that rock-paper-scissors clash. Brad got us a gift reward from the captain cookies as our winners gift. We then decided to share all those cookies with other interns when we had a movie night the next day. Similarly, I got a chance to meet Dr. Jack Hehn, the AAPT Senior Fellow. He was a sweet person, he tried to explain to us how important these internships are. And he is also a great guy to meet outside the program. I really liked all those talks from his experience from his life. Overall, the orientation day was wonderful with some nice group photos of all our interns at the end. After that, I met with Milton, our IT guy from APS. He got me and Lucy a laptop for our work. Then we all interns were supposed to meet with our mentors but my supervisor was not available until June 2 so I had a meeting with Lucy’s mentor, Christine. But the following day, I met with my mentor, Allie (Alexandra) and Claudia.
For the first week, we only discussed the onboarding process. Got the emails, calendar and other applications like Slack, Interaction, set up. Allie made sure to explain to me the scope of their project ‘Physicists to Go’. I got mostly everything that they are looking for from me during this summer. For this week, everything was about setting all things up and getting ready for the real work, which will be starting from the new week. I still looked into their website and feedback as a head start. On Friday, we had a small event from the APS (Meet & Greet with Interns). The APS team was so nice to offer us lunch even though our meetings were online. They gave us both a Grubhub gift for our lunch.
Overall, the first week was all about setting everything and hanging out with all the interns.
And yes, I was negative this week :D
PS: I love when you guys call me by my name ;)
Saksham Prajapati