Tuesday, July 12, 2016
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Well I’ve made it halfway! I am shocked at how fast everything is flying by. Work is busy as ever, but I feel like I’ve been learning so much. I had the opportunity to experience what goes into planning a conference this week and that was pretty cool. My mentor at NIST is one of the collaborators planning a conference for underrepresented minorities and she took me to her Wednesday meeting to give some insight. It was a pretty great experience. I spent most of the workweek trying to figure out how to work with optics that are used in the Raman spectrometer. It’s confusing, but is also a good intro for the optics class I will be taking in the fall. On Friday there was a soccer tournament at work with free food, so all in all you could say that work this week was a success.
Outside of work, I was able to be a part of the Women in STEM reception that was going on at Capitol hill. It was pretty cool to see a bunch of young girls who were so interested in science. As a whole the week seemed to fly by.
Since I am right at around the halfway point of my internship I decided it was time to visit home and see all of my loved ones that I missed. I flew back to Texas on Friday evening, and after a short weather delay, was finally able to arrive back home. I spent my first day home with my boyfriend catching up on all of the tv shows we were behind on. After having some delicious Whataburger and setting up my apartment we decided to go back to my parent’s house for a family get-together. Of course since I haven’t eaten a lot of Mexican food at home I had to have some. My Sunday was filled with tacos and desserts. It was a fabulous time at home! I am a little sad to have say goodbye once again, but I’m excited to get back to work and prepare for my presentation this week. This week should be a good one and I hope I can figure out the analyzers and half- wave plates soon!