Sunday, June 27, 2021
By:
This week, I spent most of time on Excel formatting data for the Compare Your Institution webpage on the APS website. In my opinion, this is an important aspect of the Education and Diversity Statistics project as most institutions and most people use this as a resource very often. Even just while I was formatting data, I could see the huge difference between the level of diversity in 2015 physics programs and the level of diversity in physics programs now. Seeing this improvement has made me happy, nonetheless we still have a long way to go.
I spent the rest of my time buried in Visual Studio writing Python code. As I was doing so, I realized that some of the Excel files I am trying to read are very long. Naturally, my code is taking a while to run – frankly, I have not been patient enough to even wait for it to finish. I think either a change in my code or the data format might be necessary.
An exciting event of this week was meeting the Nobel Prize winner Dr. John Mather, who works as a senior scientist in the NASA James Webb Space Telescope project. It was an honor to meet an incredible science figure as an SPS intern and have the chance to listen to his journey and scientific projects firsthand and ask questions. I am looking forward to the SPS virtual picnic as well!
Zeynep Tuna (she/her/hers)