Friday, June 15, 2018
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As I am writing this blog post, it is hard to remember all that I’ve done the past week- I should probably be keeping notes!
I guess I’ll start with some work updates. Last Friday, I had my first conference call with my mentors Amanda, Sarah, and Gareth. Amanda and Sarah, as well as my other mentor Melanie, work here at AIP in the Niels Bohr Library and Archives are the “history half” of my mentorship. Gareth works at MIT as a professor and is a member of the Society of Rheology, where he was the president for a year, so he is the “rheology half” of my mentorship. On our conference call, we took about 45 minutes to an hour to discuss the exact goals of my internship for the summer as well as evaluate how my progress was going from the first week. I have been working through the information a little faster than anticipated which is not a bad thing.
Now, I was proud of what I had accomplished so far but was a little unclear as to exactly how Gareth wanted the bios of the medalists written out. To my surprise, he seemed to really like them, as well as my writing style! I have always been slightly self-conscious in my writing ability, so his excitement for what I had achieved so far encouraged me a lot. Other than the bios, we also decided on some other goals for me to achieve this summer. I am going to work a little bit on the Society of Rheology social media as an outreach project; whenever I find an interesting piece of information, I will share it on their Facebook page or twitter page. (Linked here for Facebook and here for twitter.) I am trying to come up with a catchy hashtag for the posts- if you have any ideas, send them my way to mcleaver [at] aip.org! I was able to share my first post on their Facebook page this week, which was very exciting! Another goal for me is to eventually upload any of the winners of the Bingham Medal that were physicists into the Physics History Network, which give short descriptions and bios about different physicists. Hopefully the bios I am writing will end up not only on there, but on the Society of Rheology’s new website that is being worked on right now!
I have also done a lot of fun stuff outside of work this week, along with the other interns. Last Friday night, we all got together to play a bunch of games and hang out to get to know each other better! I brought A LOT of games, so it’s really nice that everyone wants to play them every once in a while. On Saturday, a majority of the interns headed to OSA, where Brigette works, for the Pride parade and a party they were hosting for it. I did all of the boys’ makeup with rainbow eyeshadow and glitter. It was really nice of OSA to host all of us- they had a lot of good food (which is great for a broke college student) and fun leis for all of us to wear. The actual parade was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. We had a perfect viewing location and the rain held out all day for us, which is nice because it was supposed to thunderstorm all afternoon. The next morning, a couple of us went out to brunch at Teaism, which had amazing food and drinks. I got a ginger limeade which was awesome!
This week has also been packed full of a lot of fun things. I was surprised earlier this week when one of my physics professors, Dr. Crawford, from Gettysburg showed up out of nowhere! He was here for a meeting that I did not know about and Brad brought him up to my workplace to say hi and show him around. It really brightened my week to see such a familiar face after a week of meeting a lot of new people. On Wednesday night, a group of about nine of us interns headed out for a walk around the tidal basin at night. It was beautiful out and the monuments looked amazing lit up at night. I can’t wait to explore more of D.C., I think some of us are planning to visit a Smithsonian or two this weekend which is something I have been looking forward to for a while.
Mikayla Cleaver