Sunday, July 14, 2024
By:
Hi everyone!
On monday, I continued to work on December's profile and my final presentation for the internship. I sent an outline for the slides, an abstract, and a title to Midhat for approval. That evening I was roped into watching the later half of the Batchellorette after I finished making some dinner.
Tuesday morning the APS interns all met with the APS SciCom (Science Communication) team. I didn't know enough about SciCom to really know what to ask about, but luckily Amanda has a lot more experiecen than me so she was asking very insightful questions. Overall, I learned a lot of what it would mean to pursue a career in some kind of communications position. Then that afternoon the APS interns all met with Midhat to do a check-in. We talked about how things are going in general and what career resources APS has. That evening we went back to the same place as last week for trivia. Sadly we had to many people to compete so we were just plahing for fun, but it was definitely fun. I also had a delicious salmon burger!
Wednesday I continued to work on tagging profiles. There were some profiles that existed, but that weren't up on the website, so now that those are up I had more to go through. That afternoon all of the iterns met on zoom with a professor with a lot of experience helping students get to the careers that they are interested in to talk about gradschool and the GRE. While the GRE isn't really a huge factor in gradschool applications as of the last few year, he believes that studying for it is still very beneficial to your overall physics knowledge. I also met with Midhat again. We talked about my abstract and made some edits, I'm really happy with it now! That evening, I went for a run with Kaden to the mall and a group of us watched Cars 2.
On thursday, I had a meeting with a few people on the Government Affairs team at APS. Similarly to the SciCom meeting, I didn't know what to ask, but I learned a lot about what it's like to work in government affaris and where I can go to learn if it's what I want to pursue. For the rest of the day I continued to work on tagging profiles. When the day was over I tried to make my way the the rock climbing gym I had been going to for a trial period I was going to start, but the metro was delayed so I had to reschedule for next week on tuesday. That evening I instead went on a run with Charlotte and worked on my economics homework. Later in the night we went to Maia's room to help them make some whipped cream and Jadens room to play MarioKart and Just Dance. Jaden's brother was in town so we got to meet him too which was nice.
On Friday I did more tagging and I met with Farah, who works on the Programs team, to talk about her position and what she does at APS. Most of the conversation ended up being about advice for how to more forward in my senior year and how to make the best career decisions for myself, but we did talk about her experience organizing confrences which was very interesting. Friday night, I continued working on my economics work and we went out to hang out for a little bit.
Saturday was a full day, but fairly relaxed. In the morning I went with Collins to the clmbing gym for the free admission for Global Climbing Day. Then we checked visiting a Costco off of Collin's bucket list and enjoyed some cheap Costco food court lunch. I was planning on going back to the gym with Reidyn, but I worked on my economics homework instead. Then that evening, I played a little minecraft with some friends from highschool. They have been playing together for a couple weeks now and I haven't had the time or energy to join them until then. Later that night, we played some more just dance and crazily enough this transitioned into a few of us having a very exisistential conversation about the future of the country.
Sunday was mostly taken up by a great trip to the beach. We left the dorms around 9:00 and spent most of the day there. Around 4:00 or 5:00 it began to rain pretty hard and there was thunder and lightening coming down, so we had to leave. A few of us stopped at an Applebees for an early dinner on the way back, so we got back at around 7:00. That evening I did even more economics work. Hopefully less of my time will be taken up by economics work after next week because I have two more weeks of class, but the final paper is due next week.
I had a great time with everyone this week and learned a lot about what career options are available to me.
Charles Wszalek