Monday, July 1, 2019
By:
Reaching the halfway point of my time in DC feels bittersweet… and also a bit terrifying. In five weeks, I’ll head home to enjoy a couple more weeks of summer before I ship myself off to Chile for a ten-day data science school and then start my final year of undergrad. I’ll begin the last full year that I spend in Iowa, at least for the near future, and my last full year before I have to start “adulting” full-time. I’ll learn where I’ll be spending the next five or six years of my life for graduate school, and I’ll pack up all my things and officially move out of my parents’ house.
But before I even get to the point of worrying about all these life changes, I have a long to-do list to complete. In addition to working the next five weeks, I need to finish checking off the items on my DC tourist bucket list, study for the Physics GRE, work on a research paper, write my first drafts of fellowship application essays, narrow down my list of grad schools I’m going to apply to, keep training for a 10K (or a half marathon if the DC heat and humidity don’t kill me), make the most of my unlimited yoga classes, and probably do some other things that I’m forgetting.
Despite the stress induced by the length of this checklist, I am excited to experience these remaining five weeks. My project is going well; although I have found some hiccups in finalizing a list of physicists to feature in the deck of playing cards I’m creating, I have received approval from six of them on the content of their cards in just the last week. I am very hopeful that by the end of the summer, we will be able to feature the full list of twenty-six women and gender minorities that we’ve been working on.
I’ve also been having a blast outside of work. Last week, we participated in a science-themed trivia night and attended the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. Friday night, a few of us enjoyed a late-night karaoke jam session in the dorm lounge. Over the weekend, I went shopping in Georgetown and ate a sushi burrito, and this morning I woke up early enough to run a few miles without the weather becoming too unbearable. When I first arrived here in May, I wasn’t sure I was going to like DC, but I’m appreciating the city more and more as the summer goes on.
Although I’ve been keeping myself fairly busy the last five weeks with fun and work, I’ve been doing my best to live in the moment and get as much as possible out of this experience. So much lies ahead after this summer, but I’m looking forward to the second half of this adventure in DC. It’s been a great one so far.
Jacqueline Blaum