Monday, June 8, 2020
By:
So, let’s address the elephant in the room, the entire internship has been moved online. This said, I can’t express how grateful I am to everyone who made the virtual internship possible and fought to give us an experience we will most definitely reflect positively upon. That being said, I am the AAPT intern and my mentor is Mark Hannum and man we had a fun first week!
A few of the things we worked on were the Step-Up program for empowering women in physics, planning for the upcoming virtual AAPT summer conference, and generally meeting just about everybody involved in these projects (around 100!). Our biggest current project is designing a virtual teacher lounge for K-12 teachers attending the conference. The software we are using allows attendees to walk around in a virtual conference setting, and when the attendees get close enough, speak to each other over video call. I am very excited that we are trying to innovate and differentiate what we can do within the virtual world, maybe it will even be used in future conferences if it works out well! A final project that I was introduced to was creating a physics related podcast where we take prominent members in the physics field including high school teachers and interview them on a variety of topics. This is probably the project I’m most excited for and hope to start on it very soon.
Outside of work the interns are still getting to know each other pretty well. We will be doing zoom calls at least once a week with all of us and either have a game or movie night. We played an awesome jackbox party game on Wednesday and I’m happy to say that I think we will get to know each other pretty well over the 10+ zoom hangout sessions. Week one was busy and fun, and I find myself looking forward to what the next 9 weeks have to offer.
Benjamin Petkie