Week Five: The Fourth

It’s hard to believe that I am halfway through my ten weeks here at AIP/SPS. I have learned a lot about history research while I’ve been here, a completely new skill to me since I am used to hard science research. There are some similarities- both heavily involve computers! While the science research I have done focuses more on coding on a computer, the history research involved a lot of looking up resources available, reading old digitized articles online, and writing up the information. What is nice with history research is that there is also a lot of hands on researching I can do! This past week I have been heavily looking through our archives on the Society of Rheology which includes documents such as the original constitution (which was written on a hotel notepad, by the way), correspondence between executive committee members, and old prints of the Rheology Bulletin. It’s nice to have a break from looking at computer screens all day and be able to look into the past through the archives.

The past week has, of course, been packed full of fun things! Brigette’s birthday was last Friday so the interns all got together and had a party for her that night. The next day a couple of us went out for Danielle’s birthday, meeting her around U Street for a night on the town! It was a weekend packed full of birthday celebrations. On Sunday, Amanda was her usual awesome self and woke up at 6:30 AM to reserve 8 tickets to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (She then also went back to sleep, of course.) Our tickets were for 1:30 and we all ended dup staying until 4:30-5, if not later. There is so much more in that museum that you can see from the outside! There are actually around three floors below ground level which takes you through a timeline of African American history, starting at slavery and working its way through modern day as you move up the floor levels. The upper levels have different exhibits from music to food to television. My personal favorite was the Broadway exhibit which had original costumes from The Wiz!

On Monday, SPS threw a picnic for all the interns and their mentors at ACP. We had barbecue and played a lot of games! What was super awesome was that the creators of Looney Labs were there and played a bunch of their games with us (some not even released yet!). Andy and Kristin Looney brought a bunch of their games, like Zendo and Fluxx, to play with us. It was really cool to meet them, especially for me, because as most of my friends know I will never turn down the opportunity to play games, specifically card games like Fluxx. At the end of the night, they gave the interns a copy of Zendo for the dorm and Andy signed personalized Fluxx cards for us!

And of course, I need to write about the Fourth of July here in the nation’s capital. During the day, most of the interns met Brad for lunch at Elephant & Castle, which is an English pub. Kind of ironic for the Fourth of July, but good nonetheless. That evening we left around 4:30 to grab seats for the concert and fireworks later that night. We ended up getting some really good seats in the grass right in front of the Capitol building! We could see the stage and jumbotrons for the concert and the Washington Monument where the fireworks would be. The actual event started at 8 so it was a long and VERY hot wait for the show. But it was so worth it! John Stamos hosted the event (which was so exciting after growing up on Full House reruns) and we got to hear a lot of artists play. The fireworks were amazing and set to a live orchestra. I can honestly say I’ve never had a Fourth of July experience like this before.

I will continue to keep you all updated through the last half of this internship!