Week 1: Introduction to the SPS Intern Program (Discovering D.C. and MacBook Pros)

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Sunday, June 4, 2023

By:

Devin Kodsi

This first week has certainly flown by! The interns were able to get together for dinner Monday night before orientation at a restaurant named Tonic, where we got to learn more about one another before our initiation into the program. We began on Tuesday with our intern orientation, taking about an hour's commute to the American Center for Physics building in College Park. We were introduced to several individuals such as Brad Conrad, Kayla Stephens, Andrew Zeidell, Mikayla Cleaver, and James Taylor. We had quite an interesting time with our marshmallow-spaghetti tower icebreaker at the beginning of orientation, and I’ll just say that our team would have won if not for another group’s desire to add two extra minutes to the previously allocated time. During orientation, the interns learned about the mission of SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma in addition to the best “mentee” and networking practices. Personally, I was really energized and motivated by the orientation and was ready to start tackling the work of my internship. Or was that energy simply stemming from the free breakfast and lunch so generously provided by our directors? We might never truly know.  

Intern Dinner at Tonic

Intern Orientation Ice Breaker

After orientation, I along with the two other APS interns remained in the building to begin our IT training and set up our brand new organizational MacBook Pros. Due to my extensive experience with Windows in both my middle, high school, and college years, I am facing a bit of a learning curve to better understand the workings of these foreign devices. However, every day I feel a bit more comfortable with these computers, but I still have a while before I feel completely confident in my skills with this relatively alien landscape of a machine. After the IT meeting, the APS interns were able to meet their mentors through a Zoom call. This meeting allowed us to gain a general insight into the expectations of our positions and how we would work with our mentors. At the end of the day, the interns decided to watch the sunset behind the Lincoln Memorial. While the sunset was absolutely stunning, I sometimes found myself admiring the dozens of planes flying overhead from Reagan National Airport. 

Admiring the Sunset

Wednesday was more or less a complete 180 from Tuesday. Since my APS internship is a virtual program, I am able to conduct all of my meetings and work from the George Washington dorm room. I continued our IT meeting in the morning and quickly hopped on to an HR meeting, where I along with the other APS interns was introduced to the APS organizational structure. I was also able to meet again with my mentor to further discuss the plan for the upcoming weeks, specifically detailing my focus for the summer and the expectations of our work relationship. We ironed out how I would begin by working on updating all of the informational APS graphs and spreadsheets located on their website: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/. This is due to the annual updating of federal data, from which APS is able to create such models of annual educational trends. We further discussed the creation of a marketing plan with APS to promote the data provided by the organization and better educate the general public. For the long term, we additionally talked about the reorganization of the Excel documents found on the website to increase their comprehensibility. Throughout the week, I met with my mentor each day to work on better understanding such roles and responsibilities, and I was able to pick back up where the past intern Lucy Corthell left off by beginning to update the data of each Excel spreadsheet. At the end of the week after taking a look through and updating various Excel spreadsheets for 2021, my mentor and I were able to create a few goals for next week. Specifically, we discussed what I would like to get out of this internship and what steps I could take to progress toward such goals over the next nine weeks. While thinking ahead in such a manner was initially daunting, I am truly excited to continue learning and working with my mentor throughout the summer! (and not just because she introduced me to her cats via Zoom this week).

 

In addition to working with APS, the interns had several group events throughout the week that helped us get to know each other. On Wednesday evening, a group traveled to the national mall to play spike ball and talk about our first days of work. While I learned that I might not be the best spike ball player in the cohort, I did enjoy learning about what each intern experienced during the day. Thursday involved our room’s hosting of an intern game night, where we played the one and only Azul. If you have never heard of this game before, I would highly recommend investing your time in learning it. I was introduced to the game by my girlfriend’s sister’s husband, and I have loved playing the game ever since. It was such an enjoyable experience being able to share my passion for the game with the other interns, as I am sure some of them can attest to due to my ecstatic nature in detailing its rules and regulations. Friday evening featured a very relaxing “Jazz at the Garden” by the national mall, where we saw both outfits and dance moves that were quite immaculate. Who knew that jazz could be the perfect way to end a work week? Over the weekend, a group of interns watched the recently-released Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie. This movie completely blew me away from both its beautiful animation and ability to balance so many deep and meaningful plotlines throughout its screen time. If you do end up seeing the movie, just keep in mind that there will be a second movie coming out next year. This will hopefully prevent a sense of confusion as the movie seemingly ends at a cliffhanger. I went in completely oblivious to this fact and wanted to ensure that others don’t make the same mistake. The interns also hosted a movie night that featured Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2, which I soon realized was made 12 years ago! It was certainly great to see this film again, but boy am I starting to feel old.  

Spike Ball on the National Mall

Jazz in the Garden

 

The White House

 

 

Overall, this first week was an extremely eventful experience, and I am truly excited to see what the next nine weeks have in store for me!  

Devin Kodsi