Sunday, July 23, 2023
By:
~Song of the Week~ “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals
Spicing up this week a little bit, I had the chance to travel back up to Boston to visit Siena! This was a bit of a spontaneous decision on both of our parts, but we both realized that this would be the best time to visit before the end of the internship took over my schedule. Through our collective brainpower, we determined the best means of travel to decrease trip expenses: the Amtrak there and JetBlue on the way back. Since the Amtrak was more or less an 8-hour trip, the week started around 1:30 am for me as I woke up in preparation. Union Station was so beautiful despite not being fully awake to truly admire it!
After taking a relaxing nap, I began work for the week focusing on finalizing the graphs and images for each spreadsheet based on my discussion with the past mentors last week. I made sure to fully update each of the spreadsheets and that all necessary sections of each graph were included, and I took into account the different categories of spreadsheets to make the future updating of spreadsheets more effective. I also worked to create a set of graphs and data that might be good to include in our planned infographics, including data such as the number of Hispanic Americans in physics and STEM in addition to the percentage of physics and STEM degrees awarded to women. My mentor recommended reading a set of articles to increase my knowledge of the use of the “Underrepresented Minority” and to better understand the implications of language as a whole. After work, Siena and I made some at-home pizza and watched The Godfather!
The following day, my mentor and I met with Crystal Bailey of APS to discuss the ways that the Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) could help to bring in more data (qualitative and quantitative) for the planned infographics. I had updated a previous marketing presentation for this meeting to focus on more gender-based data, and we discussed how the percentage of degrees awarded to women graphs for each level of academic achievement (Bachelor, Master’s, and Ph.D.) could be used. During my mentor meeting, we discussed one of the articles I had read. This article focused on the harmful label of “underrepresented minority” in the United States and proposed alternative solutions for the title, stating how members of the group should be the only ones who have the right to rename. We discussed the language I worked on for the infographic graphs and data, continuously keeping in mind the implications of the language used.
As the work day came to a close, Siena and I decided to travel to Little Italy in Boston! We took the “T” (apparently slang for the metro in Boston), ate a delicious dinner that constituted hefty servings of chicken parmesan and chicken piccata, went out for drinks at a cute bar, and bought some sweet treats at a pastry shop. Good thing I’m not as indecisive as I used to be (it still took me a while to decide on what pastry I wanted though).
Wednesday involved a hefty amount of work leading into the latter half of the week. First and foremost, I began the much-anticipated work of developing my abstract since my mentor was more than happy to provide critiques throughout the week. It was certainly nerve-wracking to attempt at summarizing all the work that I have carried out this summer, but it was good to start writing my ideas down on paper (really digital paper on Google Docs, but you get the gist of it). I also made progress on reading another article that I discussed with my mentor, this one focusing on how we should work to change the ways in which we perceive diversity, equity, and social justice. I had continued work on the Top Educators List but quickly ran into a problem that I ran by my mentor. The values for the lists represent 3-year averages for all institutions, and institutions are only included in the list if their 3-year average is 3.33 and above. A list I had been working on, specifically a Ph.D. institution list for the top number of physics Ph.D.’s awarded to African American students, had a maximum 3-year average value of 2! My mentor said that she will work to see how this 3.33-and-above might be altered for lists such as these. Our meeting also involved preparing for a meeting with the APS website team to update the website with my graphs. This preparation mainly consisted of ensuring I had all the images on hand from Google Drive. When this meeting occurred later in the afternoon, I essentially was trained on how to use the “Asana” organizational task tool to upload all the completed graphs with each graph’s text. And, before this final meeting with the marketing team, I had the chance to speak again with Midhat Farooq to discuss career plans and professional development. Despite the hectic nature of the day, I was able to sit in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library with Siena. It was such a beautiful day! We ended the afternoon with a walk through the Boston Common and had some of the best sesame seed chicken I had ever eaten!
We began Thursday with a trip to the Boston Museum of Science! As a person majoring in physics, I completely geeked out at any exhibit of mathematics, engineering, and space in the museum (as I’m sure Siena can attest to). They also had a wonderful green room with a variety of flower species!
My progress with the STEM analysis reached a concluding point (at least for Bachelor’s data that is). During the week, I had been updating a spreadsheet with all the bachelor’s CIP codes, old STEM CIP codes, and new STEM CIP codes containing the number of total degrees, degrees obtained by women, and degrees obtained by men for each CIP code. With this spreadsheet, I determined the sections of majors included by the new STEM definition that had the greatest impact in altering the gender demographics of the field as defined by APS. I worked with my mentor to create a semi-finalized table to show which CIP codes had the greatest effect in this realm, including Agricultural Sciences and Psychology, and I plan to continue working on developing additional graphs to further this analysis. To prepare for my upcoming final presentation, I worked to create a bare-bones layout of what I’d like to include. I talked with my mentor, who provided a range of critiques and advice to improve the presentation. For instance, we discussed how I couldn’t necessarily talk about each of my projects in-depth due to time constraints. Rather, I would select my major projects and present on these, where I might be able to discuss other projects through questions at the end of the presentation. The end of the meeting involved a recap of the website meeting on Wednesday, where my mentor trained me on how to properly upload the graphs and text through the creation of tasks on Asana. Sadly, Thursday marked the day that I had to leave Siena, but we knew that we had a wonderful time together over the past few days!
I worked at ACP on Friday, marking my last day working in the office! I spent most of the day working on creating all of the necessary tasks for updating the website on Asana. This involved creating a task for each updated graph (PNG and PDF files) along with the corresponding text for each graph. The other main topic discussed during my mentor meeting for Friday was my draft of an abstract, which took up the majority of the meeting. Similar to past conversations this week, we discussed constantly considering the implications of language used in the abstract. My mentor was extremely helpful with critiques and advice for the next revision, which I worked on soon after the meeting. With the large yet fulfilling amount of work, the work day quickly came to an end to lead into the festivities of Friday night. I had bought tickets this past week to take part in the cultural phenomenon that is “Barbenheimer” (a double feature of Barbie and Oppenheimer). One of the interns was going with a friend from home, and they were more than happy to have me tag along to watch with them. We started the evening with Barbie at 6:00, about a 2-hour break for dinner, and ending with Oppenheimer at 10:40. The movies absolutely made up for getting back to the dorms around 2:45 am, where both were completely different but represented quite a rollercoaster of emotions. I’d definitely recommend watching them!
A group of interns traveled to a Japanese restaurant for brunch on Saturday around Dupont Circle, which had amazing sushi. That night, we experienced DC’s night life with one of the intern’s boyfriend who had come into town for his birthday. It was fun celebrating with him!
It’s been exciting, Week 8!
Devin Kodsi