Friday, June 28, 2013
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My second week in DC has flown by, a huge amount of reading, quite a bit of writing and still managing to find some time to have fun!
On Saturday I sorted out my last few “arriving in America” errands and am now fully prepared to take on life in the USA. In the evening, I met Jamie, Darren and Ro and went to the cinema. I was able to make my friends at home pretty jealous as the movie isn’t out yet in the UK and they really wanted to see it. Katherine and I hit the shops in the city on Sunday, trying to avoid the heat by moving from one air conditioned building to the next as quickly as possible. When the heat finally got too much for us, we went to get some food and ended up finding the best fries I think I’ve ever had.
Monday meant back to work and back to the books. Emily and I are still working our way through the reading list we made of books about women in physics. It’s great to realise that there actually were other female physicists out there – not just Marie Curie! We’re summarising and evaluating everything we’ve been reading so we’ve got a big bank of information to look back on when we’re working on our final product. We’ve been getting through so many books that we made a trip out to the University of Maryland libraries on Wednesday to pick up some more. The campus is great but absolutely huge and carrying round bags of books in the sun got tiring pretty quickly. After coming back to the ACP and recovering from our expedition, we got straight back in to reading and writing summaries of what we’d picked up.
On Thursday evening there was a reception at ACP with the board of the American Institute of Physics. It was so interesting to be able to talk to the wide range of very impressive people there and everyone was so passionate about what they do. It was also very reassuring when nobody seemed at all fazed when they asked me about my plans once I graduate and I admitted that I have no idea and am enjoying constantly changing my mind!
Fiona Muir