Sunday, June 25, 2023
By:
This week was a short week in terms of how many days I went into NIST this week. The week started with a holiday for Juneteenth. I few of us went to the botanical gardens during the day with someone we met at the dinner last week that works at NASA. The highlight from my day off was the potluck all the interns did for dinner that night. The theme we decided on for the potluck was Italian. I made spaghetti Bolognese. I have never made my own pasta sauce prior to that, but I think the sauce turned out better than I expected. From what I heard the feedback from everyone else matched the way I felt. The funniest thing from Monday night was Jaden decided to make homemade gnocchi. But it turned out that he didn’t budget his time well, so he showed up an hour after we started eating.
The next day work was uneventful. It was the first day that my mentor was out of town. I did not have much to do that day, so I just read some articles related to my research topic. I did, however, get my laptop set up to the Wi-Fi permanently. That means I never have to mess with the IT department again… hopefully. The highlight from Tuesday was a group of the interns went to Jazz on the Rocks at a local bar/restaurant. The only downside from that event was that between the music and other people at the event I couldn’t hear what the people in my group were saying.
Wednesday was the most exciting day I have had at NIST so far this summer. I got to run the data collection for my presentation at the end of the summer. What I didn’t expect was because we needed 10 trials for the averages the data collection took five hours. Luckily, I didn’t have to sit and watch the collection the entire time which was nice. That night, a group of us went to a bowling alley/place because they had unlimited bowling after 8 pm. That was fun. I can happily say that I won both games we played. :)
Thursday was the second day of the week where I didn’t have to go into NIST. That’s because we had a networking workshop at ACP at lunch which is the opposite direction as NIST from DC. That was a real neat event. We got to meet John Mather who is a Noble Prize winner in Physics. He talked about the project he is currently working on which was fascinating to hear about. That night we watched a movie called Forbidden Planet. It’s a space movie from the 50s and John Mather mentioned that it was his favorite move. So we decided we had to watch it.
Overall, Friday was a slow day. Both at work and after. A large group of us did go to the monuments at night. That was cool to see the monuments lit up. We also stopped to see Einstein on our way back. Saturday during the day was uneventful. At night, however, we got to present at an event called Astronomy on the Mall. It was an outreach kind of event. We got to show people physics demos and teach kids about physics. It was a neat event. As we were leaving, we discovered that because the Smithsonian museums were open late, they turned into big parties that I specifically did not stay for. Sunday nothing was done or accomplished other than writing this blog and going grocery shopping.
That concludes my summary for my fourth week of the internship program. Hope y’all come back for the next installment in a week.
Clayton Markech