Friday, July 13, 2018
By:
It is interesting to think how 6 weeks ago I landed here in D.C a few days before the internship began and I was able to run around and explore. The days before moving into the dorms I remember imagining what the summer would look like. I pictured myself living in D.C, making the commute, and working at NIST. Now that vision has manifested itself into reality and for the most part things have panned out according to plan. I am enjoying my living situation and love working at NIST. I am really glad I was able to get a bike, it makes the commute fun and adds to my morning workouts. I will definitely miss biking down some of the busy streets of D.C, as they are some fun adrenaline filled adventures that remind me of riding my bike through Manhattan.
This week was a little bit different. We had the OSA (Optical Society) and Capitol Hill tour. The OSA tour was paired up with a career workshop which was very helpful. We went over what a resume and CV is, how to construct them, and practiced applying for jobs. Afterwards we toured the building and had dinner on the roof where we got to relax. (The pizza was really good). Then we had a tour of the Capitol on Thursday We were able to see some of the offices of some senators and we also got the chance to meet Bill Foster, a physicist and U.S representative. I never knew the capitol had so much to offer the public. I figured it was mainly for political use with light tours, but we were able to experience much of it and see all sorts of things in what is essentially a museum.
This week at NIST I spent a good portion down in the lab taking some measurements and collecting more data. I had several meetings with my PI this week and we were able to take some old data and run it through my code. The code allows us to look deeper into the data. Since there is a lot of old data and a lot of new data coming in we purchased two large hard drives(a couple of TB) to store and backup the files. I also began working on my presentation and abstract for my presentation
I feel like I have to be very careful these next four weeks. In many ways. Work wise, school wise, commute-wise, working out wise. Food wise. I have to make sure I make it call count. My fear when I first got here was that my poster/presentation would tell the story of “you tried...”, but now I wish we had more time because I want to keep exploring this area of research. The days pass by real quickly now. I am shocked at the amount of things I have learned this summer.
Jesus Perez