Sunday, July 24, 2022
By:
This week I focused more on the creative side of my research. As part of my research, I am required to make a YouTube video explaining what I did and how other people can replicate it at home. As such, I've been filming all my experiments as well as all my fails for the video. Creating the supporting graphics for the video is proving to be a challenge as I need to find graphics that describe what I'm saying really well at the same time easy to understand and visualize.
Aside from that, the interns and I toured around the NIST Campus and got to see what some of the interns are working on, as well as really cool projects like the Anechoic chamber! I was definitely taken away by the cool researches being done at NIST and the plethora of instruments at their disposal. I was especially taken aback by the Anechoic chamber as I've always wanted to be in one. I knew before going in that I was going to feel really dizzy inside because I get motion sickness and I was not wrong. As soon as I stepped into the room, I got dizzy cause of the lack of sound, but that didnt stop me from exploring things! When we went silent for a bit, I definitely was able to hear my blood rushing as well as a high pitched and a low pitched droning sound. It was really cool at the same time creepy as I didnt know where the sounds were coming from, if I stayed there alone for a whole day I wouldve gone crazy.
After NIST, on the weekend the interns and I decided to go have fun in one of the pubs near the dorms and got to know more about physics careers as well as the physics department of GWU. It was really fun getting know more about them and understanding my options as a physics student trying to get a job right off the bat instead of getting a PhD. Special thanks to Brad Conrad for giving an amazing talk and treating all of us to drinks! Yesterday, some of us went to the beach and afterwards we went to a bar to celebrate the last few days we have together as interns. If it werent for this internship, I wouldnt have had met such amazing people and had such an amazing summer!
Justin Andre Avendaño