Wednesday, July 22, 2015
By:
This week I discovered Georgetown. I heard so much about how cute the neighborhood is and had to go see for myself. Connor, Max, Katie (my roommate), Brean, Brean’s friend from school, and I went there over the weekend in pursuit of thrift shops and cupcakes. We found plenty of both!
This week was slower than the past couple, work is coming to an end, the final presentations are in just a few days! But we still had things to do outside of work. Wednesday after work there was an all intern social media round table discussion at Tracy’s house with pizza and snacks. Kendra brought her family, including baby blue steel aka Conner and his big brother Ben. I managed to stay involved in the discussion despite being very distracted by the adorable babies in the room :)
Thursday was the NIST tour led by Veronica and Teresa! While NIST does not have the name recognition that NASA does, the campus is beautiful and the work done on site is awesome! 
We toured the lab Veronica and Teresa work in with their mentor, creating a detector. The cafeteria at NIST has a variety of really good food! After lunch we saw a presentation on laser cooling by Dr. William Phillips, one of the 1997 Noble Prize winners. Generally physics presentations do not rouse the audience like Dr. Phillips was able to do with his excellent physics jokes and comedic timing.
After NIST, I went straight to Ronald Reagan Airport to pick up my little sisters who visited for the weekend. It was so great to see them! We did a mixture of the typical sightseeing things and some more city things. Walking through the memorials in the evening made them that much more special. It was surprising that we really enjoyed the National Galleries, since none of us are super art inclined. The weekend has been nice with my sisters. Funny enough my mom will be here Sunday night. She is here for the AIP History department’s teacher workshop going on next week and her visit overlaps with my sisters’ by one night so we are planning on a family dinner Sunday night!
Amandeep Gill