Sunday, June 28, 2020
By:
I find that I am really growing to appreciate my supervisors asking me to define my own deadlines. This week, I was also asked to begin writing meeting agendas for my bi-weekly meetings with supervisors. This has been great! For one thing, these journals are much easier to write when there is a thorough structure to the workflow to wade through.
I finished my funding request review at the top of the week. It was definitely a surreal feeling reading about the extent of the program and assigning grades for such and such criteria. Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable experience. I feel comfortable in analyzing data and synthesizing meaning from different narratives. I think this is an inveritable quality of a Mather fellow; and is a quality that is needed in any scientist wishing to make headway in policy or government.
The ability to both see the forest and the individual tree in front of yourself is a quality that is called upon during this internship for me, and is enhanced by planning. Take for instance the .xlsx (Google Sheets/MS Excel) file I have set up for emailing institutes for information about their program. Because NIST is part of the Department of Commerce, but affiliates may be funded by the Department of Defence or otherwise by the Department of Energy, official requests for documents are investments in time and political capital.
Therefore, when I asked institutes for their annual reports, I learned from my supervisors that it was not ultimately important to obtain the annual reports for each institute. Instead, what was important was that I had information about each one that I could compile later for more industry facing projects.
However, my supervisors were also happy that I created the .xlsx file (and shared it with them over the cloud as a live document) because I then color coded institutes’ responses with how useful their information was, any outstanding facts, and who my point of contact was. For some institutes, this is simply a web-portal with fields for name, institution, email, and comments. In another, my request was forwarded to the head of government relations of the institute (obviously this cell was filled-in with bright green).
SPS and AIP staff have been amazingly helpful and supportive during this time! In order to enhance our experience and long-term growth, staff organized an interactive hour with Midhat Farooq, APS Careers Program Manager. Midhat was amazing. On the topic of developing our elevator pitches she provided a great taxonomy that allowed me to scaffold my knowledge appropriately.
Between handling the NIST weekly workload well and knowing my weekly routine, I feel as though I am well on my way in this internship. Always gaining new responsibilities from my supervisors makes me feel as though I am continuously growing and have a destination set as I head down this winding river.
Max Dornfest