Friday, June 15, 2018
By:
Last Saturday OSA hosted their annual “celebration of Inclusion.” OSA just happens to be positioned at the very start of the DC Pride Parade so each year they throw a party on the back patio with food and drinks and music for everyone to enjoy while the parade goes right by. So when Saturday morning comes around I woke up and started getting ready with probably 80% of my fellow interns. Getting ready on that day meant glitter rainbow makeup for myself and everyone, even the boys played along and let us cover them to celebrate. We had a blast at OSA that day, it was the biggest parade I’ve ever been to and everyone was so friendly and happy and proud. It warmed my heart to be a part of something so fabulous. Sunday was much more mild comparatively, we got together and watched the Martian. Great movie by the way, I highly recommend it.
To answer the question I get asked most by the interns, YES I ACTUALLY DO WORK HERE. This past week I have been spot checking excel sheets of registrants to the student leadership conferences over the years against the registrants in the database to see if anyone was missed and needs to be added to the online database, collecting photos from traveling lecturer reports and closing them out, organizing the folders and photographs and checking marketability potential, making lists of universities with optics departments and checking if they have OSA chapters so that we can reach out to those that don’t, and most importantly I’ve been working collecting information about careers in optics and making a plan to create a webpage about it for our optics for kids website as well as researching historical minorities in optics to add to our timeline. My worksite is probably the most fun but work does actually get done I promise.
Outside of work the past week has been busy pretty much each night. I love having such a great group of interns that have kind of become my family to hang out with each evening. My roommate Pheobe is an absolute doll and bought face masks for all of us to do together one evening. It was so much fun to spend some time relaxing and talking with the girls. We were laughing all night long. The next evening a large group of us put a speaker in my back pack and walked down to the tidal pool listening to the old songs Michael had saved on his phone and singing along slightly obnoxiously. It was a blast. Last night we had a family dinner all together and watched the Incredibles to prepare for Incredibles 2 this weekend, I don’t remember that movie being quite so suspenseful; I still strongly believe it’s one of the best pixar movies of all time. Tonights plans are jazz in the garden then a lecture on the Cassini mission. I love that there are so many things to do in DC and having such an amazing group to experience them with.
Brigette Smith