Sunday, June 9, 2024
By:
Hello everyone!
I feel like this was the first real week of work. On Monday and Tuesday of this week I felt like I was really moving towards a goal. I had read through almost all of the Physicist Profiles, and I had a short list of the people whos interviews I wanted to update.
On Wednesday I talked with Midhat, my mentor, and she helped me reach out to the first few people. Once that day was over I stuck around the ACP and we got to attend the most recent Trimble Lecture, “The Next Great Space Telescope: Lessons for Success in the Search for Life Outside the Solar System”. It was so interesting to hear with probably the most experienced people in regards to JWST think about our future. Before and after the lecture I did a lot of netoworking. One of my main goals for this internship was to network and meet as many different and intersting people as I could. Before the lecture I talked with Earl Blodgett, the SPS historian and one of my favorite people. He introduced me to someone who worked at Fermilab and CERN in the past. Later that night I directed him to Alejandro de la Puente, the SPS director, so that we might be able to schedule a time for all of the interns to talk with him more. I also had an opportunity to talk with a man who does contract work for many different large scale operations. I don't think that I have heard any first hand experience from a contract worker doing applied physics work, so I gave him my card and told him that I would be happy to interview him for his own profile.
While I was sitting in the lecture, I turned around and saw a man that looked very familar, but I couldn't place who he was or where I had seen him. I turned to Jenna and she said that they had never seen him before, so I thought that maybe I was getting him confused for someone else. At the end of the lecture, I asked Jaden if he recognised him and he did, but had the same problem that I originally did. Shortly after that, he ends up close enough that I can read his lanyard, Robert Petre - NASA. After a quick google search, I get on NASA's website and I see the word DIRECTOR. Robert Petre is the Director of Astrophysics NASA Goddard. After a minute or two of hyping myself up I grab a few other interns and I introduce myself. All in all, it went very well, he seems like an amazing guy with a passion for people and progressing physics. He even offered to help schedule a tour of Goddard for the interns and passed out his buisness cards to all of us to make it happen! On top of that, we also got to meet Chirstopher Stark, the Deputy Observatory Project Scientist for JWST.
The next day, Thursday, was a roller coaster. I had recently updated my linkedin and had been adding people in pursuit of my goal of networking, so once I got to work at the ACP I sent Robert a linkedin connection with a message about how much I appreciated his time the night before. He doesn't have many linkedin connections so I didn't expect anything back, but within a few hours, I get a message from him and a notification that he had been added to my network. Only a few moments later, I noticed that the "Connect" button was back on his linkedin page, as if I had never tried to connect. My first thought was that he was trying to keep his network small so that his linkedin feed wasn't full of a bunch of random people, which is completely reasonable. I went on with my buisness sending some emails about scheduling interviews and reading though more profiles. Later that day I tried to connect with Chris and I got a notification that he had also been added to my network, but then when I wen to this page, again I saw the "Connect" button. Now I'm thinking that there is some key piece of linkedin norms that I'm missing. Is it common for people to approve connections and then immediately disconnect? At lunch I talked with Jaden, the intern with probably more linkedin connections than the rest of us combined, to see if he had any insight into what was going on. He said he was just as confused as me and we joked about some outlandish explainations for what happened. After that, I had a great meeting with the APS webteam about how some ideas that Midhat and I had could be implimented on the APS website like filters and recomended pages. Far later in the day annother I get annother linked in notification that my uncle had added me back, but again when I check his page, I see "Connect". At this point I know something weird is going on. I check a website that collects website complains and plots them over time to see if something weird was going on with linkedin on that day. Sure enough, right at 7:00 am there is a big spike in reports that continued well into the afternoon. Finally the missing piece was revealed. We then all headed to the metro to get on a boat for a netowrking dinner cruise and on the way there Alejandro told me about a friend of his that has a physics degree and works as a fighter pilot. I told him that I was looking for interesting people to interview and he seemed like a great person to talk to.
The next morning I checked in on my linkedin and found that all three of the strangely behaving profiles had gone back to normal. I sent emails to Robert about scheduling our tour, Alejandro about his pilot friend, and read through more profiles to find people I thought could use an update to their profile. Once the day was done, a few of us went to the National Gallery of Art - Sculpture Garden for Jazz in the Garden. It was a very chill evening. Charlotte, one of the interns, doesn't watch a lot of movies, so on our way back to our dorms we came up with a list of movies to watch over the rest of the internship. That night we ended up watching Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and Shrek, a great combo!
On Saturday I finally made it our for annother run. This time I ran to Theodore Roosevelt Island, one of my favorite places in DC. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the first of many beatings my legs were going to take over the next few days. Right after getting cleaned up after the run I walked to get groceries and then we walked to the Natual History Museum. We then walked to the DC Pride Parade, which was definitely the highlight of the day. Everyone there was just so happy to be there! With all of that though I hadn't been off my feet all day.
On sunday I woke up and my legs felt so tired and achey. Using them at all was tiring in the morning. We then talked about going to the zoo and spent several hours there. Not only was the zoo free, but it also had some very unique animals. At this point everything below my knees felt like it had detached from me, but that made sitting down in my room that much better. I worked on some economics homework, wrote this blog and went to bed.
Charles Wszalek