Friday, August 3, 2018
By:
This week was the last full week of work this summer, which is crazy to me. I didn’t realize that this summer would go so fast. What’s been nice is the proximity to home- I am able to see friends and family, whether they come to visit me, or I go to visit them. It’s helped keep the homesickness at bay! Last Saturday was exactly that, as I got to see my little, Sammi, and spend the day with her and her family. We went to a cute little pick-your-own farm to look through the shop and then to a special day at the outlets where there were fun free treats and giveaways. We ended the day with some liquid nitrogen ice cream!
This week has really been crunch time on finishing up my work. As of today, I am on the 1988 Bingham Medal winner’s biography, Dr. William Schowalter. He is a chemical engineer who worked at both Princeton and the University of Illinois. Completing this biography takes me up to 97 pages, or 16,637 words, worth of writing. This is the most I have ever written in my life! It’s amazing how I’ve gone from practically fearing writing projects to being able to crank out a biography, timeline, and sources at about 1-2 biographies per day. At the beginning of this week, I also was able to collect headshots from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives for use on the Society of Rheology webpage. Audrey Lengel, the photo archivist here at NBLA, was super helpful in helping me understand copyright issues we may need to address and then she was also able to resize the headshots into thumbnails for use on the SOR website. I now have a folder of about 40 biographies of past Bingham Medal winners that are ready to be edited and put up on their website!
This week I have also been working on my final presentation. On Monday, our abstracts were due to James, so he can start to compile everything and get it ready for our last day here. Our presentations are due to him on Monday so that he and Danielle can look over our slides and suggest changes in time to change them before practice presentations on Thursday. Kristen and I are also presenting to Amanda and Sarah on Monday to get a practice-practice presentation in before we turn our slides into James.
I think this last week has been the worst homesickness-wise. My family is all at the beach this week which is our yearly family vacation with my immediate family, cousins, aunts, uncles, and my Nana. But I was helped a little bit on Monday by a Skype call with them! Every year since we were little, we did a treasure chest scavenger hunt and the treasure chest would be filled with fun little toys, makeup, candy, etc. As we got older, the older cousins (I’m one of the oldest) would start to help hide the chest for the younger ones and even make maps for it! This year, it was a little different. Each of us (there are 5) had a scramble puzzle to figure out. We started out youngest and moved to oldest, so I was last. Obviously, I couldn’t be given pieces of a puzzle to work on since I was in DC- but my mom mailed me an Amazon package and on the receipt was a word puzzle for me! Each puzzle had to do with travel and a family vacation- and we’re going to Disney World! Anyone who knows me knows that Disney is my favorite place and I could not be happier. It definitely is helping me push through these last few weeks!
Mikayla Cleaver