Friday, June 19, 2015
By:
This past weekend I really felt the perks of being an SPS intern! Friday evening we were all treated to a posh dinner at Clyde’s restaurant in DC. It was DELISH! After dinner a few of us braved the humidity to do a walking tour of sorts around the monuments guided by our fearless leaders, Courtney and Sean! As we trekked around Courtney was an awesome tour guide and Sean was in full paparazzi mode to capture the good, the bad, and the goofy moments! Saturday was a much needed chill day but Sunday brought more excitement. I went rock-climbing with three other interns at the Earth Treks Climbing Center and it was SUPER fun. Once I was all set in my harness I spider-crawled up the wall and made it all the way to the top, no sweat! Turns out the trick to climbing is to use your legs to take tons of small steps.
Back at NIST I started off the week playing with more data in Excel while waiting for a wafer to be etched. Python code came knocking on my door as well so I spent a couple days familiarizing myself with the signal processing technique used to make use of the data from previous nanopore experiments. I began digging into the pre-existing code to figure out how it works so I can hopefully make some modifications. On the last day of the week our wafer was finally ready! We spent the rest of the day learning how to properly clean it using all the right chemicals (in the right order of course !). It's good to be up to speed again.
Teresa Turmanian