Friday, August 9, 2013
By:
Our last week was a blur of presentations and final evaluations. We had a day to practice and finalize our presentations for the SPS Intern Symposium. Fortunately, my presentation was nearly done, so I spent most of Monday playing with my color scheme to make sure everything was clear and readable when projected on the large screen in the conference room.
On Tuesday, invited mentors, family and friends, and ACP staff attended the symposium on and watched our presentations. My parents enjoyed hearing my presentation and the wide range of work done by other interns. After the presentations, my parents went to see the Niels Bohr Library at AIP (John from AAPT offered to give them a tour), and the other interns and I went to the State Department. We met a few physicists and astronomers who work at the Department (and one who worked at the Office of Science & Technology Policy). They discussed how they use their science background in their work doing science for policy and/or policy for science. Their perspective was similar to those we met during our tour of the Capitol – they use science in non-science fields – but they work more on the implementation side of policy.
Wednesday morning was also quite busy filling out evaluations for the internship program and signing thank-you cards. We then did a tour of ACP for the other interns and stopped by the library, APS, and AAPT. Beth made the AAPT stop interesting with a few demos and teaching toys including a tippy top (a top that turns over if you spin it fast enough). I enjoyed seeing the library archives since it reminded me of seeing the archives last summer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Wednesday night we hung out in the dorms one last time before we all packed up and moved out. It was bittersweet, but a good ending to the summer nonetheless.
Christine O'Donnell