Week 1: The beginning!

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Sunday, June 6, 2021

By:

Karthik Rao

Week 1 is officially over! To everyone reading this post, hi :)

I am a recent Physics and Computer Science graduate from Texas A&M University. This summer, I am one of the NIST research interns, and I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity.

Week 1 started with an orientation, followed by initial meetings with my mentors at NIST. It was nice getting to know my cohort and meeting the people in charge of organizing the internship. There were several topics discussed on how to have a successful and enjoyable internship experience, which I found helpful since this was my first “real job” outside of college. The following days involved daily meetings with my mentors at NIST, completing required trainings and getting a general idea of the projects I would be involved in. Specifically, the projects are investigating the use of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and Blockchain Technology in ensuring electronic hardware security, and imaging electric field distributions on the surface of integrated circuits with electrostatic force microscopy. I will be working closely with another SPS intern on both projects. I hope to learn a lot and contribute towards these projects.

The week ended with a “Bad Physics” movie night, where several interns got together on discord and watched Ant-Man. It was a fun experience pointing out the various physics-related fictional concepts in the movie with other physicists. I look forward to bonding with my cohort and really getting to know everyone.

Karthik Rao (he/him/his)