Wednesday, June 21, 2017
By:
This week has been amazing in its own way. During the school year like so many other students around the country, I work a part time job over 20 hours a week, am a full-time student, and an officer in multiple clubs. I almost never have time to myself and am constantly thinking about various responsibilities. While after finally settling into life here in D.C., I have gotten to go out and have fun. It’s strange, I feel like I am re-learning how to be a normal person. I am re-learning how to have fun and what does that really look like for a 21-year old anyways. I get to expand my own social skills which is something I haven’t gotten to do in a while. I get to have conversations without feeling like I am being constantly criticized or put down or feeling like I must put up an argument. I get to live by my own standards which is strange because for the last few years I feel like I have been drowning in what everyone else wants for me. That’s just not healthy and it hasn’t allowed me to blossom into the person I know I can be.
From my perspective, our group of interns is having so much fun. On Saturday, we attended the Pride Parade with the Optical Society of America. I had never seen so much love and open-ness in one place. I almost cried when I first saw the amount of true pride the LGBT community had for themselves; It was truly touching. The parade itself was crazy long, it started at 4:30pm and we left at 7:45pm while the parade was still going. On Tuesday, Michael Forkner finished his last final and graduated from Oregon State University. A few of us went out and celebrated his graduation and experienced some of the D.C. nightlife. Then on Wednesday, a few of the interns attended an event at the Optical Society of America focusing on optical practices in the biological fields. After that a few of the girls got pedicures, unfortunately there was a little mix up and some interns went to a different nail salon accidently. On Thursday, we had lunch with SPS Executive Committee, which was the first time we got to network with the Executive Committee. Later that day we all boarded a boat and took a dinner tour around the D.C. area. It was nice to get to socialize with the Executive Committee at a more casual event and get to know a little more about my fellow interns. There were some dancers in our intern group and there are some who definitely don’t dance. But it seems like there are just some songs that everyone knows.
The project has been moving along, we are soon to start making demos of our physical exhibit. We should be almost ready to put up the physical exhibit by the end of next week. For this week, there was a lot of research that we had to do but we also moved into seriously thinking about the design of the exhibit.
Victoria (Tori) Eng