Sunday, June 7, 2020
By:
Week one has been an exciting ride through white-water rapids. Given COVID-19, I am already so appreciative to have an internship at all this summer; so it is amazing to have also been assigned a serious caseload of work. The first day, I was tasked with reviewing legislation. Throughout the week I have been examining, reformatting, and organizing the sections relevant for my team. However, by Wednesday I was also working on building the templates for different innovation centers’ annual reports.
This is great! Contributing to the annual report for the innovation centers helps me with my research paper. During my first meeting with my supervisors, when asked what I wanted out of this internship, I proposed a publishable paper. I am narrowing my choices down to two research topics. The first is to write a paper on rare earth metals in US supply chains, specifically, in advanced manufacturing. The data would come from the >10 NIST-affiliated organizations that rely on these in some way or another. However, the topic would be somewhat qualitative in nature, and is an issue that has already been explored extensively.
The other option is to examine labor shortages within the advanced manufacturing sector. I took econometrics at Cal with the head of the Labor Studies Dept., Dr. Card, and he has agreed to help. I plan to find job requirements for various positions at Manufacturing USA centers (which I am assuming at this point, is data I will be able to collect). I would then cluster certain requirements together to form endogenous variables. I would like to employ Bayesian inference somehow, and I know how to perform a simple least-squares regression across different variables. The broader question I would like to address is, what are areas of friction within the labor supply chain within the United States? More specifically: What labor shortages within NIST’s 15 Manufacturing USA centers could benefit from such specialized targeting?
Dr. Card would like to hear three research proposals from me next week. At the moment, my supervisors would like me to finish hyperlinking the legislation they assigned me. I apologize to you, my reader, for not introducing all the great co-interns and other amazing people I have met so far. As I said, though it is only week one, I am already soaked and headed downstream from the rapids at full speed.
Max Dornfest