Sunday, July 16, 2023
By:
It's still surprising how quickly the summer is moving by. I'm conflicted on how I feel about it. This has easily been the most eventful summer of my life, however I can't help but think of how much I'm starting to miss home and Millersville University. I've got senior year coming up, and I'm really excited to apply a lot of the things I've learned to the upcoming year. Not only that, I need to start preparing my path to graduate school. I need to reach out to schools and see what programs would be strong fits. I'm not excited about the prospect of doing more applications, but it's necessary.
My work is beginning to wind down, since my mentor and I met the primary goals we set out to acheive. We developed a method to turn make diamond electrically conductive, tested several different samples, and analyzed them. The past week was largely us trying to extend to project. We wanted to move onto lithography, and needed to deposit gold onto our samples to do this. I believe i mentioned last week that our first filament design burned out, so we spent the early part of this week designing a new one. I got to do a bit of metalworking and create a custom piece of equipment that would handle a higher power input. By thursday, my mentor and I were able to test it and observed a perfect layer of gold coating our sample. With this done, the next step in lithography would be to coat the surface with a special polymer that helps with carving. An electron gun can be used to then carve an electrical channel on the diamond surface, which is perfect to act as sort of gate for an electronic device. However, my mentor is taking a vacation next week, and I cannot continue the work on my own, so I am a little limited in what I am able to do. For now, I'll need to update my paper/report on everything we have done in the past two weeks, and add a bit more discussion.
Before my mentor left for vacation, him and I sat and talked for about an hour. He gave me a lot of advice for the future concerning careers and school. I always enjoy listening to those more experienced share said experience and how I can take advantage of the opportunities all around me. He really stressed how many opportunities there are in physics, and how many options there are. He also really stressed the importance of diversifying yourself, and I can understand why. I used to think it was best to become an expert in one specific thing, but now I'm starting to realize it's better to have a variety of skills. The more skills you have, the more options, and employement opportunities there are.
Spent a good bit of time with the other interns this week! Went shopping, had a game night, and had a few parties including another potluck! Now that a few weeks have passed I've started to connect with more of them and open up too! I'm really thankful for the awesome group of people we have with us here in DC :)
Colin Myers